Moshe Arens

Moshe Arens was born in 1925 in Kaunas

Arens was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a Jewish family. His father was an industrialist and his mother a dentist. The family moved to Riga and in 1939 emigrated to the United States, settling in New York.

He served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and studied mechanical engineering at MIT. After coming to Israel in 1949, he worked as an engineer on water systems for Tel Aviv. In 1951 he went back to the U.S. to study aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

He taught aeronautical engineering at the Technion and from 1962 to 1971 was a deputy director general of Israel Aircraft Industries. There he oversaw projects including the Kfir fighter jet. In 1971 he received the Israel Defense Prize.

Arens entered the Knesset for Likud and chaired the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He opposed the Camp David Accords. He was ambassador to the United States, Minister of Defense in 1983 to 1984, 1990 to 1992 and 1999, and also Minister of Foreign Affairs.

After politics he wrote opinion columns for Haaretz and a book on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was married to Muriel Eisenberg and they had 4 children. He died on 7 January 2019.