When Larissa Trimbobler was heavily pregnant, a photograph of her was splashed across the front page of one of Israel’s leading newspapers under a banner headline proclaiming “The Murderer’s Baby”. Few readers needed to be reminded that the father of the child she was carrying was jailed for life without parole for killing Yitzhak Rabin — a crime that had traumatised the nation — or that the conception was the result of a controversial conjugal visit. Ever since Trimbobler had won a protracted legal battle for the right to marry Yigal Amir behind bars, their story had fascinated and repelled the Israeli public in equal measure. “Like it or not,” observes a veteran journalist, “this bizarre couple have become celebrities.”

The media feeding frenzy intensified after Trimbobler, a Russian immigrant in her mid-forties, gave birth to a son. Jewish religious law requires the ritual circumcision ceremony, known as the brit milah, to be carried out on the eighth day of a healthy male child’s life. In this case, that fell just 24 hours after a memorial rally for the murdered prime minister had drawn a massive crowd to the Tel Aviv park where Amir, then a law student in his mid-twenties, had stalked him and shot him down in November 1995. Over fierce objections from Rabin’s family, Trimbobler asked a court for temporary leave for her husband to attend the ceremony outside his jail. That was rejected, but the court ruled that the brit milah could be performed inside the prison.

As Trimbobler arrived at the Rimonim jail in central Israel, a crowd of left-wing activists were swapping insults with hardline nationalist demonstrators who revere Amir for having derailed the 1993 Oslo peace agreement with the Palestinians (“he’s our Nelson Mandela,” one told journalists). Pale but composed, shielding the baby’s face from the scrum of photographers, Trimbobler made her way to a large army tent in the exercise yard. Before a dozen family members, her husband was led in wearing prison uniform, legs shackled but handcuffs off to allow him to cradle the child during the ceremony.

After the boy had been named Yinon Elia Shalom, from the Hebrew for “Messiah” and “peace”, two of Amir’s brothers carried him through the prison gates, flashing victory signs for the cameras. In the febrile climate of the occasion, many Israelis believed the couple had arranged an induced birth to coincide with the Rabin commemorations. The brothers fuelled such suspicions by crowing to reporters that “the date of the circumcision is absolutely not random”.

Later that day, reportedly dismayed by the event’s TV coverage, Israel’s then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, pledged that Amir, now 39, would never be set free to rejoin his wife and son.

A month after her baby was born, I talked to Trimbobler at her flat in the Ramot district of Jerusalem, home to a large and growing community of haredim — the most conservative of Orthodox Jews. Ramot’s menfolk favour dark suits, broad-brimmed black hats and straggly beards. Orthodox women adhere to a strict code of “modesty” that requires long skirts and sleeves, high necklines, and, after marriage, some form of head covering in public.

There had been an awkward moment when I turned up earlier than Trimbobler expected, just as she had begun to breastfeed Yinon. If it didn’t bother me, she said, perhaps we could talk while she continued feeding him under her housecoat.

Petite and pretty, with shoulder-length brown hair and a ready smile, Trimbobler spoke in a soft, childlike voice, apologising for her poor English (which is actually perfectly serviceable) and wondering why a British newspaper would be interested in her. Although Orthodox Jewish women are often uncomfortable alone with men from outside their immediate circle, she seemed at ease, serving coffee with her son tucked under one arm. She laughed aloud when I told her that her lawyer warned me not to underestimate her intelligence and determination.

In the past, Trimbobler has sidestepped questions about her own feelings concerning Rabin’s assassination. But when I asked how she would one day explain to her child that his father was an infamous killer, the response was swift and unequivocal. “I will tell him his father sacrificed himself for the sake of his own people,” she said crisply. “Yigal acted as he did because he wanted to influence the political process. He saw the Oslo peace deal as a disaster that gave away land belonging historically to the Jews, and he felt it was his religious duty to oppose that.”

Did she believe that this justified gunning down a democratically elected leader? “What I can tell you is that Yigal is not a violent person by nature,” she said eventually. “He was confronted with a very difficult moral problem, which he solved in his own way.” So she condones what he did? “It’s hard for me to be truly objective.

I would never condone murder, but I understand what pushed him into taking that ultimate step.”

Not long before I met Trimbobler, an opinion poll had suggested that around 15% of the Israeli public, the clear majority of religious Jews, felt that Amir, who has never expressed the slightest remorse for his crime, should be freed immediately; more than 25% favoured releasing him after he had served 20 years. Although Ehud Olmert appeared to have slammed the cell door on her husband for good, Trimbobler still hopes that one day they will be reunited. “It’s very encouraging that people are no longer afraid of being portrayed as dangerous extremists simply because they advocate Yigal’s release.”

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