Victor Shem-Tov

Victor Shem-Tov was born in 1915 in Samokov

Shem-Tov was born in Samokov, Bulgaria, to Rachamim and Linda Kuyumdzhiyski, a family of goldsmiths. He grew up mostly in Sofia, studied at the Hebrew school there and later at a Bulgarian gymnasium. He joined the Maccabi youth movement and left school in his final year to train on a farm before emigrating.

He emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in March 1939 and joined Hashomer Hatzair that year. He helped absorb Bulgarian immigrants in Jerusalem and Jaffa, and from 1941 he worked for British intelligence as an announcer on a secret radio station broadcasting to Bulgaria. He later chaired the Bulgarian Immigrants Association and was Mapam secretary in Jerusalem in the 1950s.

He was elected to the Knesset in 1961 and also sat on the Jerusalem City Council. From 1969 he served as a minister without being a Knesset member, first without portfolio and from 1970 as Minister of Health under Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin. In 1974 he briefly also held the welfare portfolio and, with Aharon Yariv, proposed a formula calling for recognition of the PLO.

He returned to the Knesset in 1981 and was Mapam secretary general from 1979 to 1985. He opposed the First Lebanon War and resigned from the Knesset on 15 March 1988. He died in 2014 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.