Alla Kushnir

Alla Kushnir was born in 1941 in Moscow

Alla Kushnir was born in Moscow on August 11, 1941. She became a Woman International Master in 1962 and played in several USSR women's championships.

She challenged Nona Gaprindashvili for the women's world title in 1965, 1969 and 1972, and lost each match. She won the USSR women's championship in 1970 and won the Women's Chess Olympiad with the Soviet team in 1969 and 1972.

She moved to Israel and led the Israeli team to first place at the 1976 Women's Chess Olympiad in Haifa. That year she became a Woman Grandmaster and won the Roosendaal Interzonal. In 1978 she married Marcel Stein, a Bank Leumi executive.

She then turned to an academic career in the Department of Classics at Tel Aviv University, researching the coins of the Land of Israel. She edited Israel Numismatic Research and contributed to the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. She retired in 2009 but kept publishing and teaching students.

In 2013 she received the Ya'akov Meshorer Numismatic Prize. She died in Tel Aviv on August 2, 2013, after a short illness. In 2017 she was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame.