Ariel Sharon - Early Life

Early Life

Sharon was born in 1928 in Kfar Malal, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, to a family of Lithuanian Jews — Shmuel Sheinerman (1896–1956) of Brest-Litovsk and Dvora Scheinerman (1900–1988) of Mogilev. His father was studying agronomy at the University of Tbilisi, Georgia (Georgian SSR) and his mother had just started her fourth year of medical studies when the couple married. They immigrated to the British Mandate Palestine from Russia, fleeing the early pogroms associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. Apart from Hebrew, Sharon's father spoke Yiddish and his mother spoke Russian; their son also learned to speak Russian as a young boy.

The family arrived in the Second Aliyah and settled in a Kfar Malal, a socialist, secular community where, despite being Mapai supporters, they were known to be contrarians against the prevailing community consensus:

The Scheinermans' eventual ostracism ... followed the 1933 Arlozorov murder when Dvora and Shmuel refused to endorse the Labor movement's anti-Revisionist calumny and participate in Bolshevic-style public revilement rallies, then the order of the day. Retribution was quick to come. They were expelled from the local health-fund clinic and village synagogue. The cooperative's truck wouldn't make deliveries to their farm nor collect produce.

Four years after their arrival at Kfar Malal, the Sheinermans had a daughter, Yehudit (Dita), and Ariel was born two years later. At age 10, Sharon entered the Zionist youth movement Hassadeh. In 1942 at the age of 14, Sharon joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later the Haganah, the underground paramilitary force and the Jewish military precursor to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).