Sonia Peres, the wife of President Shimon Peres, passed away at home in Tel Aviv today. She was 87. Shimon and Sonia Peres married in 1945, but lived apart in recent years.
Sonia met Shimon at the Ben Shemen Youth Village, where her father was a carpenter. They married after Sonia was discharged from the British Army, in which she served during World War II.
Sonia Peres avoided the media limelight, and preserved her and her family's privacy, despite her husband's many public positions. She was a housewife, and when Shimon Peres was elected president, she declined to move to the President's Residence, but stayed at their apartment in Tel Aviv's Ramat Aviv neighborhood.
Sonia and Shimon Peres have three children: Zvia Walden, a psycholinguistics teacher; Yonatan, a veterinarian, who specializes in seeing-eye dogs; and venture capitalist Nechemia (Chemi) Peres, a former Israel Air Force pilot.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 20, 2011
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