Yitzhak Navon

Yitzhak Rachamim Navon (Hebrew: יצחק נבון‎; 9 April 1921 – 6 November 2015) was an Israeli politician, diplomat, playwright, and author. He served as the fifth President of Israel between 1978 and 1983 as a member of the centre-left Alignment party. He was the first Israeli president born in Jerusalem and the first Sephardi Jew to serve in that office. Navon was born in Jerusalem to Yosef and Miryam Navon, a descendant of a Sephardi Jewish family of rabbis, and had ancestry in Jerusalem going back centuries. On his father's side, he was descended from Sephardi Jews who settled in Turkey after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. His ancestors, the Baruch Mizrahi family immigrated from Turkey to Jerusalem in 1670. On his mother's side, he was descended from the renowned Moroccan-Jewish kabbalist rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, who immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem in 1742.

In 1924, the Navon family moved from Jaffa Road to the Ohel Moshe neighbourhood in Nachlaot. In 1932, they moved to Sheikh Badr near the western entrance to Jerusalem, relocating to Mekor Baruch in 1936.He attended the Doresh Tziyon and Takhemoni elementary schools and the Hebrew University high school.Navon studied Arabic and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught Hebrew literature for several years. He was fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Ladino, French and English.

Navon was a member of the Haganah's Arab Intelligence Unit and worked undercover in Jerusalem. During the war, he listened to wiretapped conversations of the British Army. Later he was sent by the Israeli foreign service to Uruguay and Argentina to track down Nazis.

Navon was married to Ofira Navon née Resnikov, who died of cancer in 1993. They had a son, Erez, and an adopted daughter, Naama. Navon died in Jerusalem at the age of 94 on 6 November, 2015.