By GREER FAY CASHMAN

SECURITY PERSONNEL at Beit Hanassi were somewhat taken aback last week when the attractive woman accompanying Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, the President of Iceland, said a cheery “Shalom” and “Boker Tov” to all and sundry.

The words were uttered without any trace of a foreign accent, and those who were not in the know scratched their heads in wonder, because the woman had an air about her which indicated that she was not an employee.
Indeed she wasn’t. She was the First Lady of Iceland, who happened to have been born in Jerusalem as Dorrit Moussaieff and raised until her early teens in the capital’s Bukharan Quarter.

Although being the first lady gives her a certain status, she is no novice to nobility, and has rubbed shoulders with some of the most important people in the world. Her family roots comprise generations of jewelers, and her father, Shlomo, is one of the world’s most famous collectors of Judaica, with precious objects dating back to the First Temple period.

He established the Moussaieff Center for Research in Kabbala at Bar Ilan University, to which he donated his grandfather’s collection of rare Kabbalistic manuscripts, along with a collection of rare books.
Shlomo Moussaieff, his Viennese-born wife Aliza and their three daughters moved to London in 1963 when Dorrit was 13. Having grown up in the jewelry business, which has at one stage or another been a source of income for all the branches of her family, it was natural for Dorrit Moussaieff to find her own forte in jewels, and for many years she dealt in rare stones. She was also engaged in refurnishing ancient British buildings and contributed articles to various publications, mostly periodicals that deal with the arts. She also contributed and continues to contribute to The Tatler.

Her first marriage, at a young age, to Jewish designer Neil Zarak was short-lived, and three decades passed before she found someone else with whom she was prepared to spend the rest of her life.

The man in question was a widower, who happened to be the President of Iceland. They got married in 2003 on his 60th birthday, after a three-year engagement. He has another Israel connection in that he was born on May 14, which is the Gregorian calendar date of the birth of the State.
Because Iceland’s First Lady still has a large number of relatives and friends in Israel including a sister who lives in Tel Aviv, she comes to Israel from time to time to catch up with people on a face-to-face basis.

A visit here in 2006 almost caused a diplomatic incident. Since she was a minor when she left Israel and spent most of her life in Britain, Moussaieff never thought about taking out an Israeli passport. As far as she was concerned, she was a British citizen and traveled the world on a British passport. She continued to use her British passport even after she became first lady of Iceland, and in May, 2006, was detained at Ben Gurion Airport by security personnel who refused to allow her entry on a British passport. Immigration officials told her that because she was an Israeli, she was obligated under Israeli law to enter the country on an Israeli passport.

There was a rather unpleasant exchange between Moussaieff and the bureaucrats, and the media somehow got hold of the story.
However the incident did not deter her from coming back.

Her most recent visit to Israel with her husband was a private one, but even on private visits presidents and prime ministers like to get together with their counterparts, and President Shimon Peres was quite happy to welcome them.