Pnina Gary

Pnina Gary was born in 1927 in Nahalal

Pnina Dromi was born in Nahalal in 1927. Her parents, Yosef and Tzipora Dromi, came to the country from Ukraine in 1919. She attended the agricultural high school in Nahalal and then trained as a kindergarten teacher.

In March 1948 her fiancé Eli Ben-Zvi, son of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Rachel Yanait, was killed near Beit Keshet days before their wedding. Later that year she joined a group of teachers sent to the DP camps in Germany, where she set up kindergartens for Jewish children. In Munich she met the journalist Robert Gary, and they married in 1949 and moved to Israel.

From 1953 to 1957 she studied acting in New York with Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg. In 1959 she co-founded the Zavit Theater, which ran for 9 years. From 1968 she acted at Habima, where she also ran the Bimartef workshop from 1973 to 1976.

From 1981 to 1990 she was artistic director of Orna Porat's theater for children and youth. She adapted novels by writers such as Amos Oz and S. Y. Agnon for the stage. In 2008 she wrote and directed the one-woman show An Israeli Love Story, based on her own life.

The play was staged abroad, and in 2015 she published an autobiographical novel of the same name. A film based on her story was released in 2016. She died in Tel Aviv in 2023.