Menachem Begin dedicated his life to serving his nation, and twice reached the pinnacle of his ambitions – first as the commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL) before the establishment of the State, and then as the sixth prime minister of the State of Israel. He himself felt, even after the signing of the peace accord with Egypt that – “Nothing can ever compare to the feelings I experienced during the period of the underground, or those of a person fighting from the underground for the freedom of his nation.”
Menachem Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk, then Brisk, Lithuania on Av 13, 5673 – August 16, 1913 to Ze'ev Dov and Hassia (nee Kosovsky). Because he was born on Shabbat Nahamu – the Sabbath of Comfort – following the three-week period of annual national mourning over the destruction of the Temples ending on the ninth of Av – he was given the name Menachem – the comforter. His father was the secretary of the Jewish community and one of its first Herzlian Zionists. Although poor, the humble Begin home was filled with love and warmth. The parents gave their daughter (Rachel Halperin, who passed away on September 8, 1991) and two sons Herzl and Menachem, a strong Jewish Zionist education. Hassia sacrificed herself for her children, of whom Menachem was the youngest, and strongly urged them to acquire a good education.
At the age of only one year, Menachem was already “witness” to his first war – World War I – which forced him and his family to abandon their home in Brisk and wander through the villages and forests of eastern Poland. When the war ended, they returned to Brisk, at which time Menachem began to go to school – first to the traditional cheder and then yeshiva, followed by the Jewish Tachkemoni school of the Mizrachi movement, the Polish government secondary school and finally, the University of Warsaw. At the age of five, he was a “particularly clever boy, active and always willing to learn,” as recalled by his kindergarten teacher some 60 years later.
Begin, who observed Jewish tradition all his life, refrained from writing on Shabbat while at school. He once, even, received a failing grade in his favorite subject, Latin, because he refused to take an examination given on Shabbat. Already before becoming a Bar Mitzvah, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Asked to write a composition for school on the subject, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he wrote, “a lawyer,” explaining that he wanted to “help the wretched and downtrodden.”
Until the age of 13, Menachem, like most of the Jewish youth of his town, was a member of Hashomer Hatza’ir, which at the time was a national scouts movement, devoid of socialist content. Begin made his first speeches as a member of this movement. The very first was when he was only ten when he spoke before a large audience gathered in Brisk’s main park. It was on the minor holiday L’ag Ba’omer, at the culmination of the traditional parade of the Jewish youth movements. Young Menachem spoke Hebrew, delighting and enthralling his listeners. At the age of 16, he joined the Betar youth movement. In 1930, he heard Ze'ev Jabotinsky for the first time, and the experience left a powerful and lasting impression on him.
“I was captivated by the integrality of Betar’s Zionism, the Land of Israel, the aspiration to establish a Jewish state in our time,” Begin would relate many years later.
In 1931, he began to study in the law faculty of the University of Warsaw and supported himself by giving private lessons. He was very active in student affairs, although his involvement in public activities had begun many years earlier. Despite graduating law school, he never practiced law, but his legal education served him well throughout his entire political career. On more than one occasion, he and his Jewish friends were attacked and beaten but were not afraid to reciprocate and fight back. In the university, he was among the first to organize the Jewish students to defend themselves against the anti-Semitic bullies. In 1935, he completed his law studies and graduated as Magister Juri.