Gideon Ben-Yisrael

Gideon Ben-Yisrael was born in 1923 in Haifa

Ben-Yisrael was born in Haifa in 1923 as Gideon Frizer, to engineer Zeev Frizer and Hana. He joined the Haganah in 1937 and was its recruiting officer in Jerusalem from 1938 to 1940.

He served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army from 1942 to 1945, then stayed in Europe to help bring Jews to the country. In the War of Independence he was a company commander in the Etzioni Brigade and was wounded.

After the war he studied economics and international relations at the London School of Economics. He returned in 1953 and was secretary of the Beersheba Workers Council until 1959. He received a law degree in 1960 and ran a law office in Beersheba from 1962 to 1969.

He was elected to the Knesset for Mapai in 1959 and later joined Rafi. He then held senior roles in the Ministry of Labor and in the Histadrut, and taught labor relations at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University.

From 1996 he chaired the Histadrut Pensioners' Union until his death. In 1999 he founded a pensioners' party, which did not win a seat. He died in Tel Aviv in 2014.