Yitzhak Belfer

Yitzhak Belfer was born in 1923 in Warsaw

Belfer was born in Warsaw in 1923, the third of 6 children of Esther and Chaim, a merchant. After his father died, he moved with his mother and siblings to his grandfather's home. From 1930 to 1938 he studied at the school of Janusz Korczak's orphanage and then volunteered there for another year.

In September 1939, after the Germans took Warsaw, he fled to the Soviet Union and did forced labor in coal mines in the Urals. In 1941 he moved to Tashkent and joined a Red Army cavalry unit, then worked in a factory until the war ended. In 1946 he returned to Warsaw and learned that his whole family had died in the Holocaust.

In 1947 he sailed on the immigrant ship Af Al Pi Chen and was held by the British in the Cyprus camps, where he studied drawing and sculpture with Ze'ev Ben-Zvi. He reached Israel in 1949 and served in the IDF. After the Sinai War he studied at the Avni Institute of Art and then art history.

He joined the Association of Painters and Sculptors in 1965 and founded painting classes for the Tel Aviv municipality. From 1972 he taught painting at the People's University in Tel Aviv. In 2003 a memorial he made for Korczak and the children was unveiled in Günzburg, Germany. He married Rosa in 1961 and died in 2021.