Meir Shamgar

Meir Shamgar was born in 1925 in Gdańsk

Meir Shamgar was born Meir Sternberg in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk in Poland. His parents, Eliezer and Dina, were Revisionist Zionists. He immigrated to Palestine in 1939 and attended the Balfour Gymnasium in Tel Aviv.

He joined the Palmach and later the Irgun. In 1944 he was arrested for activity against the British and held in a detention camp in Eritrea, where he studied law by correspondence with the University of London. He returned to Israel in 1948 and fought in the war that year.

After the war he studied history and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his law studies. He returned to the army as a military prosecutor and became Military Advocate General in 1961. After the Six-Day War he designed the legal framework of the military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He was Attorney General from 1968 to 1975 and was then appointed to the Supreme Court. He became its president in 1983 and retired in 1995. In 1996 he chaired the commission of inquiry into the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and he died in 2019.