The year 2010 marks the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Prime Minister Rabin, Israel's fifth Prime Minister, was killed on November 4, 1995. Ambassador Michael Oren remembered the Prime Minister from the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC:

As a teenager, while visiting Washington with a Jewish youth group, I was introduced to Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Along with my peers, we applauded him until our hands were numb, sang “Shalom Aleichem” at the top of our voices. And silently I said to myself: “That is what I want to be when I grow up, Israel’s ambassador to America.”

That man, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was Yitzhak Rabin, my fist role model.

Later, when I went to work for the Israeli government at the beginning of an historic peace process with the Palestinians, Rabin was my boss. The process precipitated terrorist attacks in which many people were killed, including my sister-in-law, a visiting American student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Jewish opponents of the process meanwhile protested; some threatened violence.

Rabin paid the ultimate price for his dream of peace, but that dream remains his legacy, inspiring us to this day.