Whereas Shimon Peres was born as Szymon Perski on August 21, 1923, in Vishnev, Poland, today part of Belarus; Whereas in 1934, he and his family emigrated to Israel, then the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate; Whereas Peres joined the pre-cursor to the Israeli army, the Haganah, helped found Kibbutz Geva, and became involved in the Hanoar Haoved youth movement; Whereas in 1945, Peres joined the Young Guard of Mapai, the political party that later became the Labor Party, and was elected to the steering committee; Whereas in 1945, Peres married Sonia Gelman, to whom he was married for more than 60 years until her passing in 2011; Whereas in 1952, Peres was appointed deputy director general of the Defense Ministry of the State of Israel; Whereas Peres was elected as a Mapai member to the Knesset in 1959, where he would go on to serve for 50 years; Whereas Peres, with David Ben-Gurion, worked to establish the labor party in 1968; Whereas Peres served in the Golda Meir government in various positions; Whereas Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed Peres as defense minister in 1974; Whereas Peres led the labor party to victory in 1984, upon which he became Prime Minister, and then foreign minister in the unity government created with the Likud party; Whereas Peres worked to achieve a peace agreement with the PLO and successfully negotiated the Oslo Accords, which were signed in 1993; Whereas for his work on the Oslo Accords Peres, along with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994; Whereas upon the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Peres assumed the role of Prime Minister and led the country through a difficult period of mourning and unrest; Whereas in 1996, Peres founded the Peres Center for Peace, dedicated to promoting peace-building and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians; Whereas in 2007, now a member of the Kadima party, Peres was elected as Israel’s ninth President; Whereas in July 2012, Peres was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom