Bracha Peli

Bracha Peli was born in 1892 in Starovychi

Bracha Peli was born Bronya Kutzenok in the village of Starovychi, northwest of Kiev, in the Russian Empire. She was the eldest of 7 children in a Hasidic family. Her father was a lumber merchant who supplied wood to the army, and her mother ran the village store.

As a child she listened to her brothers' lessons and learned Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. Her studies at a gymnasium in Kiev were cut short in 1905 by pogroms, and she resumed them in 1907. She later finished a commercial college in Kiev.

In 1914 she married the teacher Meir Pilipovetsky despite her family's objection, and their son Alexander was born in 1915. That year she founded a Jewish gymnasium for boys in Malin, which enrolled 400 students. In July 1921 the family moved to the Land of Israel and settled in Tel Aviv.

In 1922 she opened a public library in Tel Aviv, later called Moriah, which also became a book importer and distributor with branches in several cities. In 1926 a one-day discounted book market was held, an event that grew into Hebrew Book Week. She founded the Masada publishing house in 1932, and it published encyclopedias and other multi-volume works.

From 1946 her publishing house worked on the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, supervised by her son Alexander. She died in Givatayim in 1986.