Joseph Ciechanover

Joseph Ciechanover was born in 1933 in Haifa

Ciechanover was born in Haifa in 1933 to Yitzhak, a lawyer, and Bluma, an English teacher, who had come from Poland in the early 1930s. He grew up in the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood. His younger brother is the Nobel laureate Aaron Ciechanover.

He studied education, law and business administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He later studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1966 to 1967. In 1991 he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and Jewish studies from Boston University.

He worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, where he met Moshe Dayan, and was its legal adviser from 1960 to 1968. He was legal adviser to the defense establishment from 1968 to 1974 and headed the Defense Ministry mission in the United States and Canada from 1974 to 1978. He then served as Director General of the Foreign Ministry.

He chaired the board of Israel Discount Bank from 1986 to 1991 and the board of El Al from 1995 to 2001. In 1997 he chaired the inquiry into the attempt on Khaled Mashal in Jordan. In 2010 he represented Israel on the UN panel on the Turkish flotilla.

In 2016 he led talks with Turkey for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He received the Israel Prize in 2021. He died on 17 September 2024.