Born on September 9, 1952, in Busk (then a part of Poland; after World War I the city became a part of Ukraine), Israela Oron came to Israel as a child in 1957. Her father, Nathan Naor, was also born in Busk, in 1921. He completed high school and worked as a logistics manager. His wife, Edzia, a homemaker, was born in 1916 in Tomaszów Lubelski (Poland). During World War II both she and Nathan escaped from the Germans to Russia and spent the war in one of Stalin’s camps in Siberia. After the war, the couple met in Busk and married in 1950. Their older daughter, Yehudit (Shemesh), was born in 1951. 

Israela enlisted in the IDF in October 1970. In 1998 she was appointed commander of the central training base for women, where she was responsible for all the IDF’s basic and officer training of women. In 1991 she was the first woman to be appointed deputy to the IDF’s spokesperson and directed the unit’s operations throughout the Gulf War. In 1993, Oron, who holds both a B.A. degree in psychology from the University of Haifa and an M.Sc. in Business Administration from Tel Aviv University, was the first woman to be appointed a faculty member at the IDF National Defense College, the highest academic facility for all security entities, where she was in charge of developing and implementing the college’s defense strategy studies and its curriculum. 

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