Literatureאהרן אבדי

Ervin Abádi

Aharon (Ervin) Abádi was a Hungarian-born Israeli writer, journalist, graphic artist and painter, and a Holocaust survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

1918 to 1979Bergen-Belsen watercolorsThe memoir EtmolFounding Hungarian weekly A Het TukreIllustrating Hebrew children's books

Born: 9 April 1918, Budapest
Died: 3 May 1979, Ramat Gan
Occupation: writer, graphic designer, illustrator, graphic artist
Education: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design

Ervin Abádi was born in 1918 in Budapest

Abádi was born in Budapest in 1918 to Zvi and Bella, writers with Zionist views. He showed a talent for drawing at a young age and was sent to study art in Rome. He returned to Hungary when racial purges began in Fascist Italy, and taught drawing at a school to pay for his mother's cancer treatment.

During the war he helped found the Zionist underground in Hungary, was caught and sent to forced labor camps, and later to Bergen-Belsen. He was freed, ill with typhus, when the camp was liberated in 1945. While recovering in an American field hospital in Hillersleben, he painted 25-30 watercolors of camp life.

Back in Budapest he married Sara Grossman and was active in Betar. In 1946 he was arrested by Hungarian police for trying to attack the British embassy. In 1950 he immigrated to Israel with his family and settled in Ramat Gan.

In Israel he worked as a graphic designer and book illustrator and wrote for the Hungarian-language daily Uj Kelet. He wrote and illustrated books in Hebrew and Hungarian, including the memoir Etmol. In the 1970s he founded a Hungarian literary monthly that soon became the weekly A Het Tukre.

Abádi died of illness in 1979 and was buried in the Southern Cemetery. His widow Sara edited the weekly for years after his death.