Leah Rabin

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Leah Rabin (Hebrew: לאה רבין‎ née Schlossberg April 8, 1928 – November 12, 2000) was the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995.

[edit] Biography

Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), in 1933 Leah emigrated with her family to Mandate Palestine where she met her future husband, Yitzhak Rabin, at school. They married in 1948, the year of Israel's independence.^[1]

Yitzhak became Prime Minister in 1974 following Golda Meir's resignation, but in 1977 a US Dollar bank account (illegal at that time in Israel) held by Leah was exposed by Haaretz journalist Dan Margalit. As a result, her husband decided to take responsibility, resigned from office.^[2] This came to be known as the Dollar Account affair.

Leah supported the peace efforts of her husband in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worked further for a solution after his assassination.^[1] She wrote a book about her memories of her husband, which was released in 1997, under the name Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy.

She supported Shimon Peres in the elections of 1996, calling people to vote for him so that so that her husband's death "would not be in vain."^[3] She also expressed her disappointment after he lost the elections to Benjamin Netanyahu. In the election of 1999 she supported Ehud Barak. However, during Barak's term as prime minister she changed her opinions about him. She was especially disturbed by the fact that he was negotiating a territorial compromise in Jerusalem.

Rabin was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in Petah Tikva in 2000 at the age of 72, a few days after the fifth anniversary of her husband's assassination.^[2]

The couple's daughter, Dalia was later a Knesset member for the Centre Party, New Way and the Labour Party, serving as Deputy Minister of Defense.

[edit] References