Shin Shifra

Shin Shifra was born in 1931 in Tel Aviv

Shin Shifra was the pen name of Shifra Shifman Shmuelevitch. She was born in Tel Aviv in 1931, the fifth of 8 children, and grew up in Bnei Brak in a long-established Jerusalem family. Her father was among the first teachers of the new kind in the Land of Israel.

She attended the Talpiot girls' high school in Tel Aviv and completed the Levinsky teachers' seminary. She also studied Kabbalah, Jewish philosophy and Hebrew literature, and later Sumerian and Akkadian.

Her first poems appeared in 1953, edited by Yonatan Ratosh, and she was close to the Canaanite group. With Jacob Klein she spent 15 years translating an anthology of Ancient Near East poetry from Sumerian and Akkadian, published in 1996. It includes the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish.

She founded the Center for Arab Children's Literature with an Arab teachers' college in Haifa. From 1998 to 2006 she taught at Tel Aviv University and the Levinsky College of Education. In her later years she wrote books for young readers based on Sumerian and Akkadian myths.

In 1964 she married Matityahu Shmuelevitch, a former Lehi member. She died in 2012 and was buried beside him at the Yarkon Cemetery.