Gal Gadot was born in Petah Tikva, Israel, and raised in its neighbouring city Rosh HaAyin. In Hebrew, her first name means "wave" and her surname means "riverbanks". Her parents are Irit (née Weiss), a teacher, and Michael Gadot, an engineer. Both her parents were born in Israel, and they had Hebraized their surname from "Greenstein". Gadot's maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Her ancestry is Polish-Jewish, Austrian-Jewish, German-Jewish, and Czech-Jewish. She has one younger sister named Dana. Her high school major was biology. She says that in high school she was successful at basketball because of her height. As a teenager, her first jobs were babysitting and at Burger King. As an adult, Gadot started studying law and political science twice at the IDC Herzliya college.