Last Friday a state memorial service took place in the Mount Herzl cemetery commemorating 4 years to the day of the death of Yitzchak Shamir, the 7th Prime Minister of Israel, and 5 years since the death of his wife, Shulamit.
On the eve of the memorial, the Begin center opened a new project meant to honor Shamir's memory with a virtual online exhibition. The exhibition, themed after the 100th year since Shamir's birth, is in English and is accessible to millions of online visitors throughout the world through "Google Arts and Culture", a platform that enables museums and cultural institutions worldwide to make their collections accessible to the wider public through the internet. The Shamir exhibition features archived material, short videos, and other memorabilia from Yitzchak Shamir's life.
The exhibition was launched this past weekend in an event in Tel Aviv's Lechi museum. Among those in attendance were Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, Shamir's children Yair and Gilada, and the head of the Begin Center, Hertzl Makov.
"Yitzchak Shamir was the last of the Prime Ministers from the era of the Holocaust and rebirth, for whom the State of Israel was both a dream and a reality that they were able to make happen," says Makov, who served as Shamir's chief of Staff, "It is fitting that his legacy will pass on to future generations and what better way is there to do this than to use the digital platforms that can make it accessible to so many people around the world."