Friedel Stern

Friedel Stern was born in 1917 in Leipzig

Stern was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1917, the eldest of four children in a Jewish family that was not Zionist. As antisemitism grew, she left her art studies and joined a Jewish Scouts group. She immigrated with this group in 1936 to kibbutz Kfar Maccabi.

She soon moved to Haifa, where she worked as a cook and housemaid and took evening sketching classes. At the end of the 1930s she studied art and design at Bezalel in Jerusalem.

During World War II she volunteered as a nurse in the women's auxiliary corps of the British Army and later served in a camouflage unit in Italy. She sketched the daily life of British soldiers and showed her work in Egypt in 1944.

After the war she drew maps for the Survey of Palestine. From 1946 she published cartoons in Bamahane and later in Davar, Dvar HaShavua and La'isha, signing with her first name and a star. In the 1950s she wrote critical articles on Israeli society, sometimes in disguise, and she also designed posters and stamps.

From 1962 to 1992 she taught sketching at Bezalel, and for many years she volunteered with IDF disabled veterans. She never married. She died in Tel Aviv in 2006 and was buried at kibbutz Einat.