Tamar Eshel

Tamar Eshel was born in 1920 in London

Tamar Eshel was born in London in 1920, while her parents were there on a Zionist mission. Her mother, Tzila Feinberg, was a sister of Avshalom Feinberg, and her father, Zeev Shoham, was among the first lawyers in the country. The family came to the Land of Israel in 1923 and moved to Haifa in 1925.

She finished the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1937. In December 1938 she went to study at the University of London, where she later moved to studies of Arabic, Islam and the Middle East.

She joined the Haganah at 14 and ran a secret radio station for it in England from 1939 to 1943. She then volunteered for the British Army, and after her release in 1946 she was an intelligence officer in the Haganah's Shai. From December 1947 she ran an immigration operation from Marseille.

She joined the Foreign Ministry in January 1951 and served in Israel's permanent mission to the UN from 1955 to 1958. She also held posts in the Prime Minister's Office and received the title of Ambassador in 1968. In 1960 she married diplomat Arie Eshel, who died in 1968.

In 1969 she became an adviser to Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, and she sat on the city council from 1973 to 1983. She headed Na'amat and was elected to the Knesset in 1977 and again in 1981. She died in 2022.