Politicsאורה נמיר

Ora Namir

Ora Namir was an Israeli politician and diplomat who served in the Knesset from 1974 to 1996, was a government minister in the 1990s, and later served as ambassador to China.

1930 to 2019Minister of Labour and Social WelfareCommittee on the status of womenAmbassador to China

Born: 1 September 1930, Hadera
Died: 7 July 2019, Tel Aviv
Occupation: politician, diplomat, social activist
Party: Alignment, Mapai, Israeli Labor Party
Education: Hunter College, Levinsky College of Education

Ora Namir was born in 1930 in Hadera

Namir was born in Hadera in 1930 to Miriam Tichtenberg and Pinchas Toib. She grew up in Moshav Hogla. She served as an officer in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

She graduated from the Levinsky teachers seminary. In New York she studied classics and English literature at Hunter College while working with Israel's consulate and its delegation to the United Nations.

During the second Knesset she was secretary of the Mapai faction and the coalition administration. In 1959 she married Mordechai Namir, then mayor of Tel Aviv, and she worked on youth centers in Jaffa. From 1967 she led the Na'amat organization in Tel Aviv.

She entered the Knesset in 1974 for the Alignment and chaired a committee on the status of women from 1975. In 1992 she came fourth in the Labor Party leadership race. In Yitzhak Rabin's government she was Minister of the Environment and then Minister of Labour and Social Welfare.

In 1996 she left the Knesset to serve as ambassador to China and Mongolia until 2000. She ran fifth on the One Nation list in 2003 and was not elected. She died in Tel Aviv in 2019.