Personal Life
He was born on 12 February 1942 in kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. He is the eldest of four sons of Esther (née Godin; born June 25, 1914) and Yisrael Mendel Brog (August 24, 1910 - February 8, 2002).
His paternal grandparents, Frieda and Reuven Brog, were murdered in Pušalotas (Pushelat) in the northern Lithuania (then ruled by Russian Empire) in 1912, leaving his father orphaned at the age of two. Barak's maternal grandparents, Elka and Shmuel Godin, died at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust.
Ehud hebraized his family name from "Brog" to "Barak" in 1972. It was during his military service that he met his future wife, Nava (née Cohen, born April 8, 1947). They had three daughters together: Michal (born August 9, 1970), Yael (born October 23, 1974) and Anat (born October 16, 1981). Barak divorced Nava in August 2003. On 30 July 2007 Barak married Nili Priel (born April 25, 1944) in a small ceremony in his private residence. In his spare time, Barak enjoys reading works by writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In 2005, he was voted the 61st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Read more about this topic: Ehud Barak
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The personal touch between the people and the man to whom they temporarily delegated power of course conduces to a better understanding between them. Moreover, I ought not to omit to mention as a useful result of my journeying that I am to visit a great many expositions and fairs, and that the curiosity to see the President will certainly increase the box receipts and tend to rescue many commendable enterprises from financial disaster.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day,”
—James Thomson (1834–1882)