Paul Kor

Paul Kor was born in 1926 in Paris

Paul Kornowski was born in Paris in 1926 to a secular Jewish family that had come from Poland. His father Yitzhak, a tailor, was murdered at Auschwitz. Paul and his brother were smuggled to Geneva, where he lived as a refugee in a Jewish children's home until the war ended.

In Geneva he studied art and graphics at the École des Beaux-Arts. He later studied at the École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He came to Israel at the start of the 1948 war and served in the IDF as a Mahal volunteer. He married Pnina Tovbin, whom he met in the army, and stayed in Israel. He kept the name Kornowski but signed his work Kor.

Kor worked as a painter, illustrator and graphic designer, and designed Israeli stamps and banknotes. In the early 1970s he designed the last series of Israeli pound notes. His paintings were shown in Paris, Oslo, London and at Yad Vashem, and from 1974 he focused on children's books such as Caspion the Little Fish.

Kor died of lung cancer in 2001 and was buried in Kiryat Sha'ul Cemetery in Tel Aviv. In 2008 a street in Tel Aviv was named after him.