Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi (1886–1979)

Rahel (or Rachel) Yanait Ben-Zvi was born Golda Lishansky to a Hasidic Jewish family in the shtetl of Malin in the Ukraine. Hers was a close-knit, multi-generational family living the traditional lifestyle of the period. At age 15, eager to get an education, she moved by herself to Zhitomir to work and study at gymnasium. There she developed a love for botany and became involved in Zionist youth groups. In 1906, in Poltava, she was among the founders of the Poale Zion socialist party and later became one of its few active women members and leaders. The suffering and fear caused by anti-Semitic pogroms, which dominated the lives of Eastern European Jews, made her decide to immigrate to Palestine in 1908, settling in Jerusalem. She Hebraicized her name to Rahel Yanait. Rahel was part of the Second Aliyah (wave of Zionist-oriented immigration), a formative period for the Yishuv or Jewish community in Palestine. She became a founder of and teacher at the Hebrew Gymnasium. The Yishuv needed agricultural knowledge, so Rahel traveled to France to study agricultural engineering at the University of Nancy. After graduating during World War I, she returned to Palestine. In 1918, Rahel married her partner Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an historian, with whom she had two sons. Rahel and her husband were among the founders of the Labor Zionist Movement in Israel. She became a key figure and one of the leading women activists of the Yishuv. She was a central member of Haganah, the Jewish self-defense organization created during the British Mandate to defend against Arab attacks. To meet the need for the absorption of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution in Europe, Rahel helped transform a working women's farm into a training facility for farm girls and after the 1948 War of Independence, established the Agricultural Youth Village for immigrants. In 1952, her husband was appointed the second president of the State of Israel, and Rahel took an active role as First Lady. After her husband's death, she established Yad Ben-Zvi, an institution dedicated to research and publication of studies on the history of Israel and the ethnic heritage of the Sephardi and Eastern Jews. Rahel Ben-Zvi received the Henrietta Szold Award from Hadassah in 1958 and won the most prestigious award in the nation, the Israel Prize, in 1978. She was a prolific writer who published 10 books, including her autobiography, edited six more, and produced more than 500 articles.