Bezalel Smotrich
Bezalel Smotrich · Heroes of Israel
Lawyer, son of an Orthodox rabbi and leader of the Religious Zionist Party; Israel's minister of transport (2019) and minister of finance from December 2022, with an additional ministerial role in the ministry of defence.
27 February 1980, Haspin, Golan Heights
Haspin · Beit El · Kedumim
Bezalel Smotrich is recognized among Israeli contributors to Heroes of Israel — Lawyer, son of an Orthodox rabbi and leader of the Religious Zionist Party; Israel's minister of transport (2019) and minister of finance from December 2022, with an additional ministerial role in the ministry of defence.
Origins and early life
Bezalel Smotrich was born on 27 February 1980 in Haspin, a religious community in the Golan Heights, and grew up in Beit El; his father was an Orthodox rabbi. One grandfather, Yaakov, came to Mandatory Palestine before the Second World War and lost his parents, who drowned aboard a clandestine Jewish immigrant ship trying to reach it, while his grandmother Bruria survived the Holocaust; his other grandfather was a thirteenth-generation native of Jerusalem.
He received a religious education at the Mercaz HaRav Kook yeshiva, at Yashlatz and at the yeshiva of Kedumim, is an Orthodox Jew, and took a law degree at the Ono Academic College before qualifying as a lawyer.
Work and career
He was elected to the Knesset in 2015 on the Jewish Home list and became one of its deputy speakers, and later won the leadership of the National Union faction. On 17 June 2019 Benjamin Netanyahu, heading a transitional government, appointed him minister of transport and gave him a seat on the security cabinet. As leader of the Religious Zionist Party he ran on a joint list with Itamar Ben-Gvir that won fourteen seats in November 2022.
In the government sworn in on 29 December 2022 he became minister of finance, with an additional ministerial role within the ministry of defence. He lives in Kedumim with his wife, Revital, and their children, and in 2023 the Jerusalem Post ranked him, with Itamar Ben-Gvir, twenty-third among the fifty most influential Jews in the world.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipedia — Bezalel Smotrich ; Jewish Virtual Library ; Times of Israel ; Al Jazeera ; Jerusalem Post
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Lawyer, son of an Orthodox rabbi and leader of the Religious Zionist Party; Israel's minister of transport (2019) and minister of finance from December 2022, with an additional ministerial role in the ministry of defence.
Source: Wikipedia — Bezalel Smotrich ; Jewish Virtual Library ; Times of Israel ; Al Jazeera ; Jerusalem Post
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