Yitzhak Rabin - Personal Life

Personal Life

Rabin was born in Jerusalem on 1 March 1922, British Mandate of Palestine to Nehemiah and Rosa (née Cohen), two immigrants of the Third Aliyah, the third wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe. Nehemiah Rubitzov was born in the Ukrainian village Sydorovychi near Ivankiv in 1886. His father died when he was a boy, and he worked to support his family beginning at an early age. At the age of 18, he emigrated to the United States, where he joined the Poale Zion party and changed his surname to Rabin. In 1917, Nehemiah went to the British Mandate of Palestine with a group of volunteers from the Jewish Legion.

Yitzhak's mother, Rosa Cohen, was born in 1890 in Mohilev in Belarus. Her father, a rabbi, opposed the Zionist movement and sent Rosa to a Christian high school for girls in Homel, which gave her a broad general education. Early on, Rosa took an interest in political and social causes. In 1919, she traveled to the region on the steamship Ruslan. After working on a kibbutz on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, she moved to Jerusalem.

Rabin grew up in Tel Aviv, where the family relocated when he was one year old. In 1940, he graduated with distinction from the Kadoori Agricultural High School and hoped to be an irrigation engineer. However, apart from several courses in military strategy in the United Kingdom later on, he never pursued a degree.

Rabin married Leah Rabin (born Schlossberg) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Leah Rabin was working at the time as a reporter for a Palmach newspaper. They had two children, Dalia and Yuval. Rabin was non-religious; according to American diplomat Dennis Ross, Rabin was the most secular Jew he had met in Israel.