November 12, 2000
Leah Rabin, a peace advocate and the widow of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, dies at the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikvah after a battle with cancer. Rabin was 72 and had suffered a mild heart attack days before her passing.
Rabin dies a week after the country marks the fifth anniversary of her husband’s assassination at a rally in Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv.
Leah Schlossberg Rabin was born in 1928 in Konigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and made aliyah with her family in 1933. She met the future prime minister a few years later at a Tel Aviv ice cream stand. In 1945, she joined the Palmach, the elite fighting unit of the Haganah in which Rabin was a leader, first serving on a kibbutz and then working on the organization’s newsletter. The Rabins married in August 1948 during a truce in the War of Independence.
In March 1977, three years into her husband’s first term as prime minister, she became the subject of a political scandal that would ultimately lead to his resignation from the premiership. After a journalist saw her visiting a Washington bank during a diplomatic visit to the United States, it was discovered that the Rabins had maintained an American bank account, at the time a violation of Israeli law.
After her husband’s assassination, she became an icon for the left and the peace movement. She was especially critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term from 1996 to 1999.
