Batia Lishansky

Batia Lishansky was born in 1899 in Malyn

Batia Lishansky was born in 1899 in Malyn, in the Russian Empire. She was the youngest of four daughters of Shoshanna and Meir Yonah Lishansky. Her sister Rachel married Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second President of Israel.

She came to Palestine in 1910 and began studying sculpture with Boris Schatz in Jerusalem. She studied at an art academy in Rome, then returned and worked at Kibbutz Ein Harod. From 1923 she studied in Berlin and then in Paris, and she came back in 1929.

In 1929 she held her first solo show in the country and received her first commission for a memorial, at Hulda. She worked in stone, wood and bronze and made busts of figures such as David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Golda Meir. Her memorials to the fallen of the War of Independence stand at Kfar Yehoshua, Beit Keshet and Kadoorie, and her memorial From Holocaust to Revival is at Netzer Sereni.

Her partner was the painter Annie Neumann. She received the Dizengoff Prize in 1944 and 1957 and the Israel Prize in 1986. She died in Tel Aviv in 1992.