New York – February 5, 2023. Reacting to the news of the death of former Knesset Speaker Shevach Weiss, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder said: “I was deeply saddened by the news that Shevach Weiss, one of Israel’s outstanding parliamentarians and diplomats and a survivor of the Holocaust, has passed away. His long and distinguished life mirrored the vicissitudes of Jewish history—from the depths of the despair and destruction of the Shoah to the uplifting rebirth of the Jewish State. He served with tremendous dignity as Speaker of the Knesset, and, as Israel’s Ambassador to Poland, worked to bring both nations closer together. May his memory be for a blessing.”
Prof. Shevach Weiss was born in 1935 in Borysław, then in Poland (today in Ukraine). He and his family were saved by Polish and Ukrainian neighbors. ”The fact that I was saved is truly a miracle,” he said in a 2018 interview. “Just as it was a miracle to save any single Jew during this inhuman war. . . . As a six-year-old child, I needed help. And we were helped by ordinary yet heroic people, our neighbors from Borysław. Let us remember that only in Poland, everyone who was helping the Jews was killed — immediately and without trial.”
Weiss and his family immigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1947. He became a professor of political science at the University of Haifa and was a member of Knesset for almost 20 years. He served as Speaker of the Knesset from 1992 to 1996 and as Ambassador to Poland from 2000 to 2004. He stood alongside Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995, just before Rabin’s assassination.
Calling Weiss “a son of the Jewish nation and Polish soil,” Polish President Andrzej Duda decorated Weiss in 2017 with Poland’s highest state distinction, the Order of the White Eagle, and thanked him for his contributions to deepening relations between Israel and Poland.
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