Nehama Lifshitz

Nehama Lifshitz was born in 1927 in Kaunas

Nechama Lifshitz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1927 to a Zionist Jewish family. Her father, Yehuda Zvi-Hirsh Lifshitz, was a doctor who played the violin, and her mother Batya liked to sing. During World War II the family fled east to Uzbekistan and returned to Kaunas in 1946.

She attended the Kaunas Real Hebrew Gymnasium as a girl. She later studied singing at the Lithuanian Music Academy and graduated in 1951. Her only daughter, Rosa, was born in 1948.

She first sang as a soloist at the Kaunas Opera. With actor Mark Braudo she formed a Yiddish troupe under the Lithuanian Philharmonic, and in 1956 she gave a Yiddish concert in Vilnius. She toured many parts of the Soviet Union and became a symbol of Soviet Jews who wished to move to Israel.

She moved to Israel in March 1969 and sang songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, including Am Yisrael Chai. She toured the United States, Australia, England and Latin America, but her career later declined.

After leaving music she studied library and archive science at Bar-Ilan University. She worked as an archivist and later ran the Tel Aviv municipal music library. She died in 2017 and was buried in the Southern Cemetery.