Born on August 16, 1913 (Brest-Litovsk, Poland)
Died on March 9, 1992 (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Prime Minister of Israel
Political activist

Menachem Begin devoted his life to Israel's independence. From an early age he experienced the horrors of being Jewish in a world where Jews were not welcome and had no place to go. Begin survived imprisonment during World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan), but lost all of his family except his sister to the death camps created by German Nazis (death camps were complexes built by the Nazis for the express purpose of mass murder). A frail man with thick spectacles, Begin rose to assume the leadership of Irgun Zvai Leumi, a militant group devoted to the creation of an independent Jewish state in the Middle Eastern territory of Palestine. For the...