Yosef "Tommy" Lapid (, born as Tomislav Lampel, ; 27 December 1931 – 1 June 2008) was a Yugoslav-born Israeli radio and television presenter, playwright, journalist, politician and government minister known for his sharp tongue and acerbic wit. Lapid headed the secular-liberal Shinui party from 1999 to 2006. He fiercely opposed the ultra-Orthodox political parties and actively sought to exclude any religious observance from the legal structure of the Israeli State. He was the father of Yair Lapid, who became Prime Minister of Israel on 1 July 2022. Biography Lapid was born in Novi Sad, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (modern-day Serbia), to a family of Hungarian Jewish descent. His family was seized by the Nazis and deported to the Budapest Ghetto. His father, Dr. Bela (Meir) Lampel, a lawyer and Zionist leader, was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was murdered. His grandmother Hermione was murdered in Auschwitz. Lapid and his mother were rescued by Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. They survived the war and moved to Israel in 1948 where he worked at the Hungarian language Israeli paper Új Kelet with Rudolf Kasztner. After serving as a radio operator in the Israel Defense Forces between 1950 and 1953, Lapid graduated with a law degree from Tel Aviv University in 1957. He married Shulamit Lapid, an acclaimed novelist. and they had three children. Their son, Yair Lapid, is the chairman of Yesh Atid party, which became the second-biggest party in the 2013 Israeli elections, and was a columnist and television host. Yair became Prime Minister of Israel on 1 July 2022. Tommy and Shulamit's youngest daughter, Merav, is a clinical psychologist. Their older daughter, Michal, was killed in a car accident in 1984. Media career Lapid started out as a journalist for the Israeli Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet. Later, he was hired by the mainstream daily Maariv, where he became an influential publicist, and went on to become director-general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and chairman of the Cable TV Union. He was also the founding editor of Israeli women's magazine At, as well as a successful playwright. In the 1990s Lapid was a regular guest on the political talk show Popolitika aired on Channel 1 which often turned into a shouting match; later on he moved to the Channel 2 talk show, Politika. Lapid was awarded the Sokolov Award, Israel's top award in journalism, in 1998, for his weekly radio