Nechama Rivlin

Nechama Rivlin was born in 1945 in Herut

Nechama Rivlin, born Shulman, was born in 1945 on the moshav of Herut. Her parents, Mendi and Drora Kayla Shulman, were among its founders, and her mother had immigrated from Ukraine. Her father died when she was a small child, and her mother ran the farm.

She graduated from the Ruppin Regional High School. For medical reasons she did not enlist in the IDF. In 1964 she began studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she earned a bachelor's degree in the life sciences and a teaching diploma.

From 1967 she worked at the Hebrew University, first in the Department of Zoology and later in the Department of Ecology. She then served as scientific secretary at the Institute of Life Sciences. She retired in 2007 and later studied art history.

She married Reuven Rivlin in 1971, and they had 3 children. After he was elected president in 2014, she worked on the environment and on causes of women and children, including bereaved mothers and children with disabilities. In 2018 she founded a prize for Hebrew poetry.

She had pulmonary fibrosis and received a lung transplant in March 2019. She died on 4 June 2019 at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva. She was buried at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.