Eva Ben-Zvi

Eva Ben-Zvi was born in 1947 in Kaunas

Eva Ben-Zvi was born Chaja Ermanaite in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Soviet Union, to parents who survived the Holocaust. She began playing the piano at age 5.

From 1961 she studied piano at the Kaunas music school. She then studied at the Lithuanian conservatory in Vilnius from 1965 to 1970 and earned a master's degree in piano, while also starting voice training.

She immigrated to Israel in 1973. In 1976 she began working as an accompanist at the Tel Aviv music academy, where she also studied voice and lieder. Her first professional stage role as a soprano came with the Israeli opera in 1981 and 1982, and she later studied singing in Detmold, Germany.

In 1987 she began a solo career in Israel and abroad, singing with orchestras in Israel, Russia and across Europe. She was the first Israeli singer to perform in the Kremlin, at the 850th anniversary of Moscow. She recorded Grigory Frid's opera The Diary of Anne Frank and the Yiddish version of Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry, and she teaches singing at Bar-Ilan University.

She is married to journalist Shmuel Ben-Zvi. Her son from her first marriage is cellist Zvi Orleansky.