Yossi Tamir

Yossi Tamir was born in 1947

Yossi Tamir was born in Jerusalem on March 26, 1947. His parents came to Israel from Syria, and he grew up in Jerusalem, where he attended the state religious school Maale. He has a brother and two sisters.

He joined the IDF in 1965 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. He then studied economics and statistics at the Hebrew University, earned a master's degree in economics there, and completed a law degree in 1978. In 1989 he joined the first group of the Wexler Foundation program and received a master's in public administration from Harvard University.

He worked in research at the National Insurance Institute and helped found the economics department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was director general of the National Insurance Institute from 1993 to 1998, when child allowances were extended to Arab families and support for single-parent families grew. From 2000 to 2014 he taught at the Hebrew University School of Social Work.

Within JDC Israel he headed the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, Ashalim, the Tevet employment initiative and Eshel. In 2014 he became director general of JDC Israel and was later replaced by Dr. Sigal Shelach. He is married to Bruria Carmon and has 4 children.