Aviva Semadar

Aviva Semadar was born in 1935 in Tel Aviv

Aviva Semadar was born in Tel Aviv on 20 March 1935. Her mother's family, the Jaffes, came from Minsk, and her father Nachum came from Vilnius and taught her Yiddish and Yiddish songs. Her grandfather David Jaffe, a synagogue cantor, taught her folk tunes and liturgical chants.

She studied Bible, literature and history at the Levinsky Teachers Seminary in Tel Aviv and trained for 4 years as a coloratura soprano. She passed her teaching exam in 1955, served 2 years in the Israeli Air Force, and then taught at several schools.

In the early 1960s she used a travel scholarship to study music in Europe, learning Fado in Lisbon and Flamenco in Spain. Her TV debut came in the Netherlands in 1963, and in 1964 she sang at a Mahalia Jackson concert in Rotterdam. In 1966 she gave concerts with Jackson in the USA.

She moved to Cologne and from 1973 hosted a weekly folk music program for WDR radio. She sang mainly in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Portuguese, German and Russian, and also composed songs. She retired in 2003 and died on 18 March 2025.