Yitzhak Rachamim Navon (Hebrew: יצחק נבון‎‎; 9 April 1921 – 6 November 2015^[1]) was an Israeli politician, diplomat, and author. He served as the fifth President of Israel between 1978 and 1983 as a member of the centre-left Alignment party. He was the first Israeli president born in Jerusalem and the first Sephardi Jew to serve in that office. Navon was born in Jerusalem to Yosef and Miryam Navon, a descendant of a Sephardi Jewish family of rabbis, and had ancestry in Jerusalem going back centuries. On his father's side, he was descended from Sephardi Jews who settled in Turkey, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. His ancestors, the Baruch Mizrahi family immigrated from Turkey to Jerusalem in 1670. On his mother's side, he was descended from the renowned Moroccan-Jewish kabbalist rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, who immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem in 1742. He attended the Doresh Tziyon and Takhemoni elementary schools and the Hebrew University high school. Navon studied Arabic and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught Hebrew literature for several years. He was fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Ladino, French and English. Navon was a member of the Haganah's Arab Intelligence Unit and worked undercover in Jerusalem. During the war, he listened to wiretapped conversations of the British Army. Later he was sent by the Israeli foreign service to Uruguay and Argentina to track down Nazis. Navon was married to Ofira Navon née Resnikov, who died of cancer in 1993. They had a son, Erez, and an adopted daughter, Naama. Navon died in Jerusalem at the age of 94. In 1951, Navon became the political secretary of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The following year he was appointed Ben-Gurion's bureau chief. He remained in this position under Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. His judgment was crucial to advice the government received during the Suez Crisis and Lavon Affair. In 1963 Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister and Navon became a civil service department head at the Ministry of Education and Culture. Navon began a long campaign fighting illiteracy in Israel, which affected about 12% of the Jewish population. It's a shame and disgrace that more than 200,000 adults in Israel do not know how to read or write in any language, and we must do everything possible to erase this stain from us. Navon ordered the mobilisation of hundreds of female soldiers serving compulsory national service to teach illiterate adults to read and write Hebrew. Two years later, Navon was elected to the Knesset as a member of Ben-Gurion's Rafi. The new party which had dared challenge the Mapai establishment was driven by 'modernization and scientification'; it merged into the Israeli Labor Party (part of the Alignment) in 1968.^[3] But the labour elite of which Navon was one, would in the future dictate the Left's agenda. Navon served as deputy speaker of the Knesset and chairman of the Knesset Committee on Foreign and Defense Affairs. On 19 April 1978, Navon was elected by the Knesset to serve as the fifth President of Israel. The race was uncontested and Navon received 86 votes in the 120-member Knesset with 23 members casting blank votes. He assumed office on 29 May 1978 and was the first president with small children to move into Beit HaNassi, the presidential residence in Jerusalem. His wife, Ofira, was active in promoting the welfare of Israeli children. As president, Navon met with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and was influential in the peace talks. According to Haaretz newspaper, he achieved more in one visit than five by Israel's Prime Minister. Although the Israeli presidency is a ceremonial office, Navon was an outspoken advocate of a judicial commission of inquiry to probe Israel's role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre perpetrated by Lebanese Falangists in 1982.

Yigael Yadin (Hebrew: יִגָּאֵל יָדִין‎ IPA: [jigaˈel jaˈdin]) (20 March 1917 – 28 June 1984) was an Israeli archeologist, soldier and politician. He was the second Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and Deputy Prime Minister from 1977 to 1981. Yigael Sukenik (later Yadin) was born in Ottoman Palestine to archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik and his wife Hasya Sukenik-Feinsold, a teacher and women's rights activist. He joined the Haganah at age 15, and served in a variety of different capacities. In 1946, he left the Haganah following an argument with its commander Yitzhak Sadeh over the inclusion of a machine gun as part of standard squad equipment. In 1948, shortly before the State of Israel declared its independence, Yadin, interrupted his university studies to return to active service. He served as Israel's Head of Operations during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and was responsible for many of the key decisions made during the course of that war. In June 1948 he threatened to resign during the Generals' Revolt during which he accused Ben-Gurion of attempting "to transform the army as a whole into an army of one political party (Mapai)". Yadin was appointed Chief of Staff of the IDF on 9 November 1949, following the resignation of Yaakov Dori, and served in that capacity for three years. He resigned on 7 December 1952, over disagreements with then prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion about cuts to the military budget, which he argued should be at least one third of the national budget.^[5] By age thirty-five, he had completed his military career. Upon leaving the military, he devoted himself to research and began his life's work in archaeology. In 1956 he received the Israel Prize in Jewish studies,^[6] for his doctoral thesis on the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As an archeologist, he excavated some of the most important sites in the region, including the Qumran Caves, Masada, Hazor, Tel Megiddo and caves in Judean Desert where artifacts from Bar Kokhba revolt were found. In 1960 he initiated scholarly archeological exploration of caves south of Ein Gedi, an enterprise approved by Ben-Gurion in which Israel Defense Forces rendered considerable support. He wrote about the expedition and its findings in his 1971 book Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. Yadin considered the Solomonic Gate at Tel Gezer to be the highpoint of his career. He was sometimes forced to deal with the theft of important artifacts, occasionally by prominent political and military figures. In one instance, where the thefts were commonly attributed to the famous one-eyed general Moshe Dayan, he remarked: "I know who did it, and I am not going to say who it is, but if I catch him, I'll poke out his other eye, too." Even as an archaeologist, Yadin never completely abandoned public life. On the eve of the Six-Day War, he served as a military adviser to prime minister Levi Eshkol, and following the Yom Kippur War, he was a member of the Agranat Commission that investigated the actions that led to the war. In 1976 Yadin formed the Democratic Movement for Change, commonly known by its Hebrew acronym Dash, together with Professor Amnon Rubinstein, Shmuel Tamir, Meir Amit, Meir Zorea, and many other prominent public figures. The new party seemed to be an ideal solution for many Israelis who were fed up with alleged corruption in the Labor Alignment (the dominant party in Israel from its founding and up to that time), which included the Yadlin affair, the suicide of Housing Minister Avraham Ofer, and Leah Rabin's illegal dollar-denominated account in the United States. Furthermore, Dash was a response to the increasing sense of frustration and despair in the aftermath of the 1973 war, and the social and political developments that followed in its wake. Many people regarded Yadin, a warrior and a scholar, as the quintessential prototype of the ideal Israeli, untainted by corruption, who could lead the country on a new path.In the 1977 elections, which transformed the Israeli political landscape, the new party did remarkably well for its first attempt to enter the Knesset, winning 15 of the 120 seats. As a result of the election, Likud party leader Menachem Begin was initially able to form a coalition without Dash (or parties to its left), significantly lowering the bargaining power of Dash. Dash joined the coalition after a few months. As the new Deputy Prime Minister, Yadin played a pivotal role in many events that took place, particularly the contacts with Egypt, which eventually led to the signing of the Camp David Accords and the peace treaty between Israel and its neighbor. Nevertheless, Dash itself proved to be a failure, and the party broke up into numerous splinter factions; Yadin joined the Democratic Movement, but it too split up and he sat as an independent MK for the remainder of his term. During a cabinet meeting, May 1981, while still Deputy Prime Minister, he accused Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan of "lying to the government" and told Prime Minister Begin "You have lost control of the defence establishment."^[7] He retired from politics in 1981. Yadin was married to Carmela (née Ruppin), who worked with him throughout his career in translating and editing his books and with whom he had two daughters, Orly and Littal. He died in 1984 and was buried in the military cemetery in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. The Israeli actor Yossi Yadin [fr; he] was his brother.

Shlomo Yosef Burg (Hebrew: שלמה יוסף בורג‎‎, 31 January 1909 – 15 October 1999) was a German-born Israeli politician. In 1949, he was elected to the first Knesset, and served in many ministerial positions for the next 40 years. He was one of the founders of the National Religious Party. Shlomo Yosef Burg was born in Dresden, Germany, on 31 January 1909.^[2] He attended the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin from 1928 to 1938, and was ordained as a rabbi that year. He also studied at the University of Berlin from 1928 to 1931, and received a Doctorate in mathematics and logic from the University of Leipzig in 1933. While studying at the University of Leipzig, he joined the Young Mizrahi religious Zionist movement. He arranged Jewish prayer services in private homes after German synagogues were burned, and worked underground to help Jews escape to Britain and the Netherlands. His mother and grandmother died in Nazi concentration camps. In 1939, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine. When World War II begun, Burg was stuck in Geneva. He returned thanks to the help of Polish diplomat of Ładoś Group who provided him with a Polish passport. He worked as teacher at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium - where he taught religion wearing a kippa, which he would remove when teaching history - before moving to Jerusalem. There he became a research fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Burg lived in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. Burg was married to Rivka Slonim, who was born in Hebron and survived the 1929 Hebron massacre. They had a son, Avraham, a politician who served as speaker of the fifteenth Knesset, and two daughters, Ada, a doctor and Zvia. Burg died on 15 October 1999 at the age of 90 at the Sha'arei Tzedek Medical Center. In Palestine, Burg joined Hapoel HaMizrachi, a religious-Zionist party. Alongside three other religious parties, Hapoel HaMizrachi ran on a joint list called the United Religious Front for the first Knesset elections in 1949. The group won 16 seats and Burg took a seat in the Knesset, becoming deputy speaker.In the 1951 elections the party ran by itself, winning eight seats. Burg remained in the Knesset and became minister of health in the third government. In the fourth, fifth and sixth governments he served as minister of postal services, a position he retained until 1958. In 1956 Hapoel HaMizrachi merged with their ideological twins from the Mizrachi party to form the National Religious Party (NRP). The party was a member of all governments until 1992. In 1977, he became the president of the World Mizrachi Movement. As a key party member, Burg maintained a ministerial position in every Knesset until his resignation from the Knesset and retirement from politics in 1986, holding the positions of minister of welfare, minister of internal affairs, minister without portfolio and minister of religious affairs. Burg was famous for his erudite wit. Journalists dubbed his appearances in parliament "Burgtheater," after the famous playhouse in Vienna. According to Shimon Peres, Burg's most important legacy was trying to bridge the gulf between religious and secular Jews: "He was a religious man but he believed in compromise."Ehud Barak said Burg took the path of moderation and tolerance, and showed a love for Jewish tradition.