Literatureיהודה בורלא

Yehuda Burla

Yehuda Burla was an Israeli writer whose fiction dealt with the Jews of the East, and he received the Israel Prize for literature in 1961.

1886 to 1969Fiction about Eastern JewryThe Adventures of AkaviahIsrael Prize for literature, 1961

Born: 18 September 1886, Jerusalem
Died: 7 November 1969, Jaffa
Occupation: writer

Yehuda Burla was born in 1886 in Jerusalem

Burla was born in Jerusalem in 1886 to a Sephardi family with a line of rabbis. His father was Rabbi Yehoshua Burla. Until the age of 18 he studied Torah and Talmud at a beth midrash and a yeshiva.

He finished the Ezra teachers seminary in Jerusalem. He then taught and managed schools run by the Zionist Organization. During World War I he served in the Ottoman army as an interpreter.

After the war he headed the Zionist Hebrew schools in Damascus and returned when they closed in 1922. He ran the school in Zikhron Ya'akov from 1923 to 1926, later taught in Haifa, and taught at the Ahad Ha'am school in Tel Aviv from 1933 to 1944. He also headed the Arab Department of the Histadrut.

His novels and stories focused on Eastern Jewry and on love, and included historical novels about Judah Halevi. He chaired the Gnazim Institute from 1956 and was elected head of the Hebrew Writers Association in 1957. After the Six-Day War he helped found the Movement for Greater Israel.

He married Miriam Goldberg, and they had 4 children, among them the writers Oded and Yair Burla. He died in 1969 and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv.