Isaac Raphael

Yitzhak Rafael (; 5 July 1914 – 3 August 1999) was an Israeli politician. He served as Deputy Minister of Health in the 1960s and Minister of Religions in the mid-1970s.

Biography Rafael was born in Sasiv in Galicia in 1914 at a time when the town was part of Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine), and attended high school in Poland. During his youth he was a member of the Torah and Work youth movement, and founded a local branch of the Bnei Akiva youth movement.

He made aliyah to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and worked as a teacher in Jerusalem. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gaining an MA in Humanities. He went on to study at the New York Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a doctorate in literature.

Rafael was married to Geula, daughter of Yehuda Leib Maimon, Israel's first Minister of Religious Affairs.

Political career He worked for the Jewish Agency and was director of the department of Craftsman and Small Business. Between 1940 and 1947, he edited a small journal. He was a member of the Hagana and represented Hapoel HaMizrachi in the Assembly of Representatives in 1944. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, he was a member of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee. Between 1948 and 1953, he was a member of the Jewish Agency's board, and headed its aliyah department, where he was responsible for the large influx of Jewish refugees (numbering over 685,000 between 1948 and 1951), rejecting calls to put a limit on numbers.