Doron Almog

Origins and early life

Doron Almog, born Doron Avrotzky, was born in Rishon LeZion on 18 May 1951, the eldest of four children, and attended the military boarding school at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.

Work and career

Drafted in 1969, he volunteered for the Paratroopers and fought in the War of Attrition and in the Yom Kippur War, in which his younger brother Eran, a tank soldier, was killed on the Golan Heights. In July 1976 he commanded the first task force to land at Entebbe in the rescue of the hostages held in Uganda, and he was the first Israeli officer on the ground and the last to leave. He later commanded clandestine missions that brought Jews from Ethiopia to Israel, among them the airlift known as Operation Moses in 1984 and 1985, and from 2000 to 2003 he headed the IDF Southern Command as a major general.

Later years

His son Eran was born with severe autism and intellectual disability, and with his wife Didi he founded in the Negev the rehabilitation village now called ADI Negev-Nahalat Eran, named after Eran, who died in 2007. He lit a torch at the national Independence Day ceremony in 2006, and in 2016 he received the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society and the state. On 10 July 2022 the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel elected him Chairman of its Executive, the post Isaac Herzog had left to become President of Israel.

At the head of this Jewish institution he has championed aliyah from Ukraine, Russia and Ethiopia and the Jewish communities hit by the war in Ukraine, and the Jerusalem Post placed him with Mark Wilf thirty-sixth on its 2023 list of the fifty most influential Jews.