Lea Rabin

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Lea (Leah) Rabin (April 8, 1928 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany — November 12, 2000 in Petah Tikva, Israel) was the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995.

In 1933, she emigrated with her family to Palestine where she met her future husband, Yitzhak Rabin, at school. They married in 1948, the year of Israel's independence.

In 1977 a US Dollar bank account held by Lea Rabin was exposed (this act was forbidden at that time by Israeli currency regulators). As a result, Yitzhak Rabin decided to take responsibility on his wife's account and resigned from office.

Lea Rabin supported the peace efforts of her husband in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worked further for a solution after his assassination. She wrote a book about her memories of her husband, which was released in 1997, under the name Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy.

She supported Shimon Peres in the elections of 1996. She also expressed her disappointment after he lost the elections to Benjamin Netanyahu. In election of 1999 she supported Ehud Barak. However, during Barak's term as prime minster she changed her opinions about him. She was especially disturbed by the fact that he was negotiating a territorial compromise in Jerusalem.

Rabin was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 2000 at the age of 72, a few days following the fifth anniversary of her husband's assassination.

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