Rachel Rabin

Rachel Rabin Yaakov was an Israeli educator, kibbutz pioneer and long-time voice of the Upper Galilee settlement movement, and the younger sister of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. She died on 11 September 2026 at the age of 101. President Isaac Herzog eulogised her as a model of educational and public service. She was buried at Kibbutz Manara on 14 September 2026.

She was born Rachel Rabin on 1 February 1925 at Hadassah Medical Center in Tel Aviv, the daughter of Rosa Cohen, a Haganah commander in Haifa and Tel Aviv city councillor, and Nehemiah Rabin (born Rubitzov), a Ukrainian-born immigrant who worked for the Israel Electric Corporation and later helped defend Ramat HaKovesh. Her brother Yitzhak was three years older. Rosa died of cancer when Rachel was twelve.

As a teenager she joined HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed. After training at Kfar Giladi, her group settled the rocky ridge of Mount Menara in 1943 and founded Kibbutz Manara. In a 2009 Haaretz interview she recalled that there were no trees and almost no water, that barrels had to be brought from Lebanese villages, and that weekly walks to Kfar Giladi for showers took about two hours. During the 1948 war most of Manara was evacuated; she stayed as a medic and radio operator and, as Herzog later noted, took up arms to defend the kibbutz she had helped build.

In the early 1950s she taught the first generation of children born at Manara, first as a kindergarten teacher and then in the kibbutz elementary school. She later helped found the Har Vagai Regional School in Dafna. In the 1960s the kibbutz movement offered her an Alignment Knesset seat; she declined. From 1981 to 1986 she served as supervisory coordinator for the Ministry of Education Rural Education Department, overseeing secondary schools in kibbutzim and moshavim. She returned to Manara as kibbutz secretary, and in 1994 chaired the Organisation of Academic Colleges for Kibbutz Movement Education, linking Oranim College and the Kibbutz Seminar. That year her brother invited her to the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

Two weeks before Yitzhak was assassinated in November 1995, she warned colleagues at the United Kibbutz Movement headquarters that the street was running wild and that he was not being guarded properly. After his murder she devoted herself to preserving his memory and teaching tolerance at the Yitzhak Rabin Center.

She married Rafi Yaakov, a German-born immigrant who arrived at Manara in 1945; they had three children, Tirzah, Yiftach and Gadi, and adopted Binya Jadidi. Rafi died in 2012. She lived at Manara for some eighty years until the kibbutz was evacuated under Hezbollah fire after 7 October 2023. She relocated to Kvutzat Kinneret, celebrated her 100th birthday there, and did not return to Manara because of her health. Israeli obituaries and English Wikipedia record her death on 11 September 2026 aged 101.