Uriel Ofek

Uriel Ofek was born in 1926 in Tel Aviv

Ofek was born Uriel Popik in Tel Aviv in 1926. His father was the Yiddish poet Arie Leib Popik and his mother was a kindergarten teacher. He grew up in the Borochov neighborhood of Giv'atayim and studied at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium.

He served in the Palmach from 1944 to 1949 as a medic and medic instructor. He was a combat medic in Gush Etzion and was taken prisoner by Jordan when the bloc fell in 1948. In 1949 he officially changed his family name to Ofek.

From 1951 to 1976 he was deputy editor and then editor of the children's paper Davar L'iladim. He earned a master's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1955 and a doctorate in children's literature there in 1976. He compiled the two volumes of the Ofek Lexicon of Children's Literature.

Many of his books draw on his childhood in Borochov before the founding of the state. He translated works such as Tom Sawyer and The Wind in the Willows into Hebrew and wrote film scripts. He won the Lamdan Prize in 1965 and the Ze'ev Prize in 1976.

He married Bina Dalman in 1952, and his wife and two daughters also wrote and edited for children. He died of leukemia in 1987 and was buried in Herzliya.