Scienceגרדה אילתה-אלסטר

Gerda Elata-Alster

Gerda Elata-Alster is an Israeli literary scholar who was a professor of comparative literature and linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

born 1930Comparative literature at Ben-Gurion UniversityResearch on Aeschylus's tragediesSurviving the Holocaust in hiding

Occupation: lecturer, university teacher, literary scholar
Education: Bar-Ilan University

Gerda Elata-Alster was born in 1930 in Vienna

Gerda Tau was born in Vienna in 1930, the eldest child of a banker father and a chemist mother. In 1938 the family moved to the Netherlands, living in The Hague, Hilversum and later Amsterdam. During the Nazi occupation they obtained Paraguayan passports and hid in an attic in Hilversum until the end of the war.

She finished school in 1948 and was active in the Bnei Akiva movement, where she taught Hebrew. In 1952 she married Mordechai Alster. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Semitic philology at the University of Amsterdam and taught Hebrew at Dutch universities.

In 1964 she moved to Israel with her husband and their 3 children, and her husband died days later. She began teaching at Bar-Ilan University in 1965 and completed her doctorate there in 1971, on the tragedies of Aeschylus. In 1973 she married Haim Elata, an engineering professor at Ben-Gurion University.

From 1978 she taught comparative literature and linguistics at Ben-Gurion University for over 40 years until her retirement. In 2001 she was named a visiting professor of the Franz Rosenzweig Institute at the University of Kassel. She lives in Jerusalem.