Widow Steps Into Spotlight Leah Rabin Comforts Mourners, Attacks Opposition Leaders

Yitzhak Rabin’s widow, Leah, used to stay in the background, a woman aloof from politics who spent her days playing tennis and socializing with Israel’s elite.

Since her husband’s assassination, however, Leah Rabin has emerged as a public figure comforting the masses and sniping at opposition leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she blamed Tuesday for helping create the divisive climate that permitted Rabin’s assassination.

Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud party, accused Leah Rabin of character assassination.

Since the slaying, the 67-year-old German-born widow seems to have metamorphosed into a national mother figure, showered with the affection many Israelis now appear ashamed to have denied her husband. So far, she has brushed aside questions of a possible new career in politics.

“We love you, Leah!” supporters shouted outside her Tel Aviv apartment when she emerged to thank them for the outpouring of grief since her husband’s slaying Saturday.

As young people in the crowd vowed to support Rabin’s legacy of peace, Leah choked back tears, smiled warmly and responded: “This is so moving. … We are making peace for the children.”

It was an icier Leah who, in a series of radio and television interviews Tuesday, laid the blame for the assassination on Netanyahu and rightist lawmakers who gave violent speeches and allowed incitement against her husband at rallies.

“There was a Likud rally in Jerusalem not too long ago,” she recalled. “They put the figure of Yitzhak, my husband, in the uniform of a Nazi leader and Mr. Netanyahu was there. He later talked against it, but he was there and he didn’t stop it.”

Netanyahu maintained he did what he could to discourage violence.

“Usually a catastrophe of this kind … brings people together. It certainly did that in America,” Netanyahu said. “Nobody bothered to ask if Lee Harvey Oswald” - who killed John F. Kennedy - “was a Democrat or a Republican.”

Throughout her husband’s five decades in the public eye, Leah, her long hair pulled back in a severe-looking style, was hardly a figure beloved by the masses.

Her standing plummeted after a journalist discovered she held an illegal U.S. bank account, forcing Rabin to end his first term as premier in 1977, and leading to the Labor Party’s first election defeat that year.

Her image as a woman of regal manner - far different from her gruff, unassuming husband - was deepened by media reports a year ago that an army regiment was assigned to scour the Arava desert for a gold pin she lost during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan.

Shimon Sheves, a longtime Rabin aide and family friend, said it took last week’s tragic events to expose the real Leah.

“She’s a great woman with an open heart, a rare eloquence and spiritual strength that we probably underestimated until now,” Sheves said.