Autographs
"Yitzhah Navon" 5th President of Israel Signed Photograph
YITZHAK NAVON (1921-2015). 5th President of Israel (1978-1983), First to be Born in Jerusalem.
Photograph Signed in both English and Hebrew, "Y. Navon", 5.25" x 7", undated, black and white, Choice Crsip Extremely Fine. "Yitzhah Navon" also identified, neatly penned on verso by collector.
Yitzhak Navon was a significant figure in Israel throughout his life, most notably as the country's fifth president (1978-1983) and the first to have been born in Jerusalem. He was born into a family of Sephardic Jews in British-mandated Palestine; his father, whose ancestors had lived in the region since the 17th century, was a member of the pre-independence legislature. Navon joined Zionist groups as a boy and studied education, Islamic culture, and Arabic and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
During the war for independence, Navon served as an Arabic adviser to the paramilitary group Haganah. Following the establishment of Israel (1948), he was a diplomat in Latin America and then worked as private secretary (1951-1952) to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and as a close adviser (1952-1963) to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. In 1965, Navon was first elected to the Knesset (parliament), from which he formally retired in 1992.
Early in his term as President, Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed (1979) a peace treaty with Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat, with whom Navon, who spoke Arabic (among several other languages), had good relations. By the time he left office, however, Sadat had been assassinated (1981) and Navon had been compelled to demand an official inquiry into the 1982 massacre by Christian Phalangists of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-occupied Lebanon. He later served as Deputy Prime Minister and as Education and Culture Minister (1984-1990). In addition, Navon wrote fiction, songs, and musical plays based on Sephardic tales.