Geula Cohen, who died at the age of 93 on Wednesday, was a pre-state underground fighter, veteran lawmaker, right-wing political activist and the mother of current Likud Minister Tzachi Hanegbi.
By Howard M. Riell
“The fire that burned in Geula went out tonight,” Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin told the Times of Israel. She was, he said, an “Israeli freedom fighter in the deepest sense of the idea, who was an inspiration to myself and all of us.”
Said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “We will enshrine the memory of her great struggle for Israel’s freedom and her dedication and love for the Land of Israel.”
“Until her final day she fought for to keep the homeland whole, the unity of the nation and the ingathering of the exiles, but she never, for a moment, stopped being a loving and beloved mother and grandmother,” Hanegbi told the Times. “Her loss will not only be felt in the family, but in the heart of the people she fought for and who loved her back.”
In 1942, Cohen joined the Irgun, and moved to Stern gang (Lehi) the following year, according to Wikipedia. “A radio announcer for the group, she was arrested by the British military authorities in 1946 while broadcasting in Tel Aviv. She escaped in May, shortly before her trial, but was recaptured by a group of Arabs.”
On June 6, 1946, she was sentenced to seven years imprisonment after being charged with being in possession of a wireless transmitter, four pistols and revolvers and ammunition. During sentencing she sang “Hatikvah” and was accompanied by 30 members of her family. She was imprisoned in Bethlehem, but escaped from jail in 1947. She was also editor of the Lehi newspaper Youth Front. After Israeli independence in 1948, she contributed to Sulam, a monthly magazine published by former Lehi leader Israel Eldad.
Cohen worked extensively in the public arena “in the struggle for shleimus ha’aretz,” noted anash.org. “Cohen was also one of the main opponents of Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to hand over the Sinai to Egypt. Thanks to her many roles, she gained a special connection with the Rebbe, including a sequence of correspondence. While serving as a senior journalist in the Maariv newspaper, she also had a unique yechidus with the Rebbe during which she interviewed the Rebbe. She later published an account of her yechidus in the Israeli daily, Maariv.”
“They don’t say for nothing that the dream that you fight for comes true,” Cohen told The Jerusalem Post in a 2014 interview. “We founded an entire country from scratch. Its education, agriculture, industry, art – culture is the only thing that we inherited… It wasn’t easy – a nation that went through the Holocaust, we came from there.”
