Shevah Weiss passed away on Friday at the age of 87, reports the Haaretz portal. Weiss was in the past Israel’s ambassador to Poland and chairman of the Knesset. In 2016, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle by the President of Poland.
Shevah Weiss lived in the Israeli city of Haifa during the last years of his life. According to ‘Haaretz’, he left behind two children and a granddaughter.
Weiss was born into a family of Polish Jews in Boryslaw (Lviv province) in 1935. In 1941, the Weiss family escaped from the ghetto and hid with Polish and Ukrainian families. After the war, they lived briefly in Borysław and the so-called Recovered Territories. In 1946, they left for Palestine. Shevah Weiss was a councillor in Haifa from 1969 to 1981 and sat on the Central Committee of the Israeli Labour Party from 1977 to 1999. From the mid-1970s he was a professor of political science at Haifa University.
He had been a member of the Knesset since 1981, then vice-chairman from 1988 to 1992 and chairman of the Israeli Parliament from 1992 to 1996. He was also a Knesset delegate to the Council of Europe.
In 2001-2003, he was the Israeli ambassador to Poland. He played a significant role in public life, promoting the memory of the Holocaust. Since 2000, he was Chairman of the Council of the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute.
He was awarded honorary doctorates from numerous Polish universities. In 2016, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle by the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, in “recognition of his distinguished merits in his activities for the deepening of friendly and comprehensive relations between the Republic of Poland and the State of Israel”.