Menachem Begin was born on August 16, 1913, in Brest on the Bug into a religious Jewish family as Mieczysław Biegun. He attended a private elementary school run by the Zionist-Orthodox Mizrachi party. Then he graduated from the Polish gymnasium, and in 1931-1935 he studied law at the University of Warsaw.

He belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, a radical, pioneering youth organization that was part of the World Zionist Organization. After turning sixteen, he joined Betar, a national-radical youth organization founded by the Zionist-Revisionist Union, i.e. the extreme-right branch of the Zionist movement led by Włodzimierz Żabotyński, who referred to Józef Piłsudski.

In 1932, Biegun became the head of the Organizational Department of Betar in Poland. He traveled a lot around the country, trying to gain new members. In cooperation with the Polish Army, he organized military training courses preparing them for fighting in Palestine, and equipped Jews with weapons. He was the author of numerous articles in the revisionist press. Biegun organized illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine. In 1938 he became the leading leader of Betar in Poland.

At the beginning of World War II, he managed to get from Warsaw to Vilnius, in 1940 he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and sentenced to eight years of hard labor in a gulag. He described his memories from exile to Siberia in the book “White nights”.

After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, he joined the Polish II Corps led by General Władysław Anders. After leaving the USSR, he reached Palestine, where he contributed to create Israel. Afterwards, he founded the Herut party, in which he took over the leadership. After winning the Knesset elections in 1977, he became Prime Minister of Israel as the first “non-socialist”. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and three years later he was again Prime Minister. He died of a heart attack on March 9, 1992, in Jerusalem.