12 Facts About Yehiel Bar

Yehiel "Hilik" Bar is a former Member of Knesset for the Israel Labor Party, Secretary General of the Labor Party, and was the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset.

Yehiel Bar was born in a low-income neighborhood in Safed the eldest of five children of a Moroccan immigrant father and an Ashkenazic mother.

Yehiel Bar studied at Bezek College at Givat Mordechai in Jerusalem.

Yehiel Bar served in the Israeli Defense Force as an officer in Adjutant Corps and reached the rank of captain in the reserves, later studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Since 2002, Yehiel Bar has been a delegate at the World Zionist Congress and the World Zionist Council.

Yehiel Bar is actively involved in pro-Israel advocacy and has taken part in advocacy and coexistence missions around the world, in the course of which he met with US President George W Bush and other senior officials in both the Arab world and the West.

In 2010, Yehiel Bar was elected Secretary General of the Labour Party, the youngest person ever to serve in that capacity, and the first to be elected to the post before serving as a Member of Knesset.

Yehiel Bar was elected in January 2013 to serve in Israel's Nineteenth Knesset.

Yehiel Bar did not run in the elections for the 24th Knesset in 2021.

Yehiel Bar supported the creation of a new Israeli national holiday, Yom HaAliyah to be celebrated annually on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan.

Yehiel Bar was part of a delegation of Israeli politicians who visited Poland at the invitation of the Polish Redemptorist priest Tadeusz Rydzyk in late 2017.

Yehiel Bar was maligned for his support for Rydzyk in the Israeli media, as was Lipman.