Shimon Peres: A life in pictures

Remembering the legendary life of Shimon Peres, the last of Israel's founding fathers, 1923-2016.

By COMPILEDMICHELLE MALKA GROSSMAN, ELLI WOHLGELERNTER

SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 11:02

Updated: SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 14:51

Shimon and Sonia Peres with their three children on November 15, 1958 (photo credit: AVRAHAM VERED / IDF AND DEFENSE MINISTRY ARCHIVES) — Shimon and Sonia Peres with their three children on November 15, 1958

(photo credit: AVRAHAM VERED / IDF AND DEFENSE MINISTRY ARCHIVES)

Shimon Peres, former president, former prime minister, former defense minister, former foreign minister, former minister of eight other ministries, the last surviving member of Israel’s founding fathers, and winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize died Wednesday after suffering a stroke two weeks ago. He was 93 years old.

The longest serving of all of Israel’s public servants, Peres was a person about whom it could rightly be said: The history of the State of Israel is the history of Shimon Peres.

A young Shimon Peres in Poland before his family immigrated to Israel (photo credit: Government Press Office)

Peres was born August 2, 1923, in Wiszniewo, Poland, as Szymon Perski, and immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of 11. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attending the Balfour and Geula schools in Tel Aviv, and the agricultural high school in Ben Shemen. He spent several years at Kibbutz Geva and Kibbutz Alumot, of which he was one of the founders. In 1943, was elected secretary of the Labor-Zionist youth movement.

Shimon and Sonia Peres when they were dating (photo credit: Government Press Office)

Then-Defense Ministry director-general Shimon Peres (seated second right) attends a meeting of the IDF General Staff with prime minister David Ben-Gurion in 1961. Peres is sitting between then-finance minster Levi Eshkol and then-agriculture minister Moshe Dayan (photo credit: GPO)

In a career spanning nearly 70 years, Peres was considered a servant of the state who was intimately involved in every aspect of the country’s history since before its founding. In his 48 years in parliament – from the fourth Knesset in 1959 through the 17th in 2007 – Peres served in various parliamentary groups, including Mapai, Rafi, Labor, the Alignment, Labor, One Israel, Labor-Meimad, Labor-Meimad-Am Ehad and Kadima. His main affiliation was serving as chairman of the Labor Party.

From Left: Shimon Peres, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan (photo credit: AVRAHAM VERED / IDF AND DEFENSE MINISTRY ARCHIVES)

Yitzhak Rabin (2nd left) next to Shimon Peres, when he was the Defense Ministry's deputy director-general, with then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion to his right at a meeting for soldiers in 1959 (photo credit: Moshe Eitan / IDF AND DEFENSE MINISTRY ARCHIVES)

Shimon Peres reading the headlines with David Ben-Gurion

Then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (C) and then-defense minister Shimon Peres (2nd L) greet hostages rescued from Entebbe back in Israel (photo credit: IDF SPOKESMAN'S OFFICE/URI HERTZL TZHIK/IDF ARCHIVE)

Then Prime Minister Shimon Peres greets newly released Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky at Ben-Gurion Airport where he was flown from Germany after being freed from a Soviet prison, February 11, 1986.(photo credit: GPO)

Former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, then foreign minister Shimon Peres and then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (from L to R) show their shared Nobel Peace Prize awards to the audience in Oslo on December 10, 1994 (photo credit: REUTERS)

A lifetime searching for peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors was rewarded on December 10, 1994, when Peres – along with then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat – received a Nobel Peace Prize. The award recognized their work as the architects of the 1993 interim peace deal known as the Oslo Accords – a pact that to Peres’s dismay never hardened into a lasting treaty.

Shimon Peres sings alongside Miri Aloni and Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995. Rabin was assassinated shortly afterward (photo credit: NOAM WIND)

Peres’s string of government roles included two stints as prime minister – from 1984 to 1986 as part of a rotational government, and for seven months in 1995 and 1996 after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin – as well as minister of immigrant absorption, transportation, information, defense, communications (or posts and telegraphs as it was known at the time), internal affairs, religious affairs, foreign affairs, finance, regional cooperation, and development of the Negev and Galilee, serving in some of those positions more than once. He also served several times as acting prime minister, deputy prime minister and vice prime minister.