Leo Roth

Leo Roth was born in 1914 in Galicia

Leo Roth was born in 1914 in Tyszowce in Galicia, the eldest son of David and Rivka, in a well-off Zionist merchant family. In 1920 the family moved to Duisburg in Germany. He left school at 16 because of antisemitism, worked as an apprentice window designer and studied painting with Josef Doppelfeld.

In 1933 he immigrated to the Land of Israel and briefly cleaned shop windows in Tel Aviv. His uncle took him to Kvutzat Kinneret, and in 1934 he joined Kibbutz Afikim, where he stayed until his death. There he met Manya, and they had two children, Dudu and Zeli.

At first he herded sheep and later combined kibbutz work with painting in a hut studio. In 1951 he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, focusing on fresco. Most of his early works, mainly portraits and landscapes, were lost when his hut burned in 1947.

In 1953 he founded a painting school at Afikim for artists from across the kibbutz movement, and he directed the Art Academy of the Kibbutzim. He won the Jordan Valley Prize for Painting in 1959. His work drew on Cubism and was shown in Israel, the United States, Mexico and Europe.

His eldest son Dudu, also a painter, died in 1979. His wife Manya was killed in a road accident in 2002, and Roth died in December of that year. His students included Menashe Kadishman.