Amichai Chikli

Origins and early life

Amichai Chikli was born in Jerusalem on 12 September 1981, the son of the artist Camille Chikli and of Eitan Chikli, who was born in Tunisia, grew up in France, made aliyah at nineteen and was ordained a Conservative rabbi at the Schechter seminary in Jerusalem.

Work and career

His father has described a warm Jewish household with festive Sabbath dinners, where the boy prayed with him in traditional Moroccan synagogues, and Chikli himself has said that he sees himself as a Jew who keeps tradition. He served in the Golani Brigade and the Shayetet 13 naval unit, became a company commander in the Egoz unit, and later earned a master's degree in diplomacy and security at Tel Aviv University. In 2010 he founded the Tavor Academy for Social Leadership, a pre-army programme in Nof Hagalil, and he lives on Kibbutz Hanaton, which was established by the Conservative movement and the Jewish Agency.

Elected to the Knesset for Yamina in 2021, he voted against the new government on 13 June 2021, later left the party, and was elected on the Likud list in 2022. At the end of December 2022 he became Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, and he was also Minister for Social Equality until January 2024. In May 2023 he announced Aleph Bet, a commitment of NIS 150 million, about 40 million dollars, to train teachers and principals for Jewish day schools in the United States and Canada.

On 27 May 2024 the government approved his proposal to commemorate officially, for the first time since the state was founded, Diaspora Jews murdered because they were Jewish, with a memorial date, a monument and a public database. In 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him among its fifty most influential Jews, alongside Nir Barkat and Ofir Sofer.