Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres was born in 1923 in Višnieva

Peres was born Szymon Perski on 2 August 1923 in Wiszniew, Poland, today Vishnyeva in Belarus. His father was a timber merchant and his mother a librarian. His maternal grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, taught him Talmud and was murdered in the Holocaust with other relatives.

The family moved to Tel Aviv in 1934, after his father settled there in 1932. He studied in Tel Aviv and later at the Ben Shemen agricultural school, then helped found kibbutz Alumot. In the early 1950s he studied at The New School and New York University and took a management course at Harvard.

In 1945 he took the name Peres after a bird seen on a Negev expedition, and married Sonia Gelman. He joined the Haganah in 1947 and worked on personnel and arms purchases. He became director general of the Ministry of Defense in 1953 and built close ties with France.

He entered the Knesset in 1959 and served in it for 48 years. He was defense minister, foreign minister and prime minister twice. As foreign minister he took part in the Oslo process and shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

He joined Kadima in 2005 and was elected president in 2007, serving until 2014. He died in 2016 after a stroke.