Yehuda Avner z”l (1928-2015)
World Mizrachi mourns the loss of Yehuda Avner z”l, who was a staunch Religious-Zionist who devoted all his life to the State of Israel.
Avner was Mazkir (National Director) of Bnei Akiva UK, after helping to found Kibbutz Lavi, and then returned to Israel to devote his working life for the State.
He was advisor to Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and wrote speeches for Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol. He was also appointed as Israeli Ambassador to Britain and Australia. His memories and stories from these remarkable times were then documented in his book, entitled The Prime Ministers, which was recently made into a two-part documentary.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said the following:
“The passing of Yehuda Avner is a great loss to the whole Jewish people. In Torah the highest accolade given to our greatest leader Moses was to be called eved Hashem, “God’s servant”. Now that Yehuda Avner’s life of dedicated service has come to an end, the highest accolade I can think to say of him is that he was an eved medinat Yisrael v’am Yisrael, a servant of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Yehuda was a wordsmith par excellence. He deployed his words and his skills to great success on behalf of Israeli prime ministers and as a diplomat and was at the heart of many of the defining moments of recent Jewish history. In his latter years he memorably told the story of Israel’s prime ministers with whom he served, reminding us in a new way of the power of words to tell Israel’s story to the world. He will be sorely missed and we wish his family chayim aruchim, a long and blessed life.”
Yehi Zichro Baruch. May his memory be blessed.
By Max613 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
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