Yael Braun-Pivet, whose grandparents fled Eastern Europe in the 1930s to escape the Nazis and established in France, becomes the fourth-highest-ranking official in France after the president, Prime Minister and Senate Speaker.

A 51-year-old Jewish lawyer and mother of five is the newly elected Sspeaker of France’s National Assembly and the first woman to ever hold that position.

Yael Braun-Pivet, whose grandparents fled Eastern Europe in the 1930s to escape the Nazis and established in France, becomes the fourth-highest-ranking official in France after the president, Prime Minister and Senate Speaker.

Her grandparents entered France with tourist visas and a suitcase, in the years 1930s.

According to daily Libération she is “neither practicing nor believing” but she “celebrates Jewish holidays in the family, as did her father and especially her grandfather, a Polish Jewish tailor who, fleeing anti-Semitism, took refuge in Nancy in the 1930s.”

Braun-Pivet joined President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition in 2016 and has been a member of the National Assembly’s France-Israel Friendship Group since 2017.

She formerly served as the president of the National Assembly law commission.

A former criminal lawyer, she was “the first among her family to complete higher education” and had put her “vocation” on hold to follow her husband, an executive at L’Oréal company, for seven years in Taiwan and Japan, and to raise their five children.