Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passed away on Wednesday at the age of 100.
Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut, Kissinger Associates, Inc. said in a statement.
Kissinger was the first Jewish person to serve in the position of Secretary of State. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973. The year before, he was named TIME Magazine’s person of the year.
He was born as Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born to a Jewish family in Furth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, and moved to the United States with his family in 1938 before the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jews.
Anglicizing his name to Henry, Kissinger became a naturalized US citizen in 1943, and served in the US Army in Europe in World War Two.
He then went to Harvard University on scholarship, earning a master's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954. He was on Harvard's faculty for the next 17 years.
When Richard Nixon's pledge to end the Vietnam War won him the 1968 presidential election, he brought Kissinger to the White House as national security adviser.
In 1973, in addition to his role as national security adviser, Kissinger was named Secretary of State.
His most recent interview was with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in September, in which he expressed his apprehension regarding the developing negotiations between his country's government and Saudi Arabia.
In July of 2022, he criticized the talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Iran.
President Isaac Herzog paid tribute to Kissinger.
“Henry Kissinger was one of the greatest diplomats. A Jewish teenager who fled the Nazis and went on to become a giant who shaped world politics with his own hands and mind. The entire family of nations is blessed to this day by the fruits of the historic processes he led, including the laying of the foundations for Israel's peace agreement with Egypt. In our last conversation, in which I congratulated him on his birthday, he told me: ‘Remember, I have always loved and supported Israel, and always will,’” said Herzog.