Poet Zelda Is Born

June 20, 1914

Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, known simply as “Zelda” as one of the most widely acclaimed and beloved of Israeli poets, is born in Russia. She is the daughter and granddaughter of Hasidic rabbis, and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is a first cousin.

In 1928, Zelda’s family immigrates to the Land of Israel. The family settles in Jerusalem, but Zelda’s father and grandfather die shortly afterward. She becomes a teacher and spends most of her adult life living with and caring for her mother in Haifa and Jerusalem.

In 1950, at the age of 36, Zelda marries Chayim Aryeh Mishovsky, who moves into the home she shares with her mother. Her mother dies, and her husband falls ill soon after they marry. When he dies, Zelda is devastated. Zelda’s small family is an anomaly in the Orthodox Jewish world because she is an only child and has no children of her own.

She and her famous cousin maintain a prolific correspondence about grief and loss, spirituality, and the need to engage with life.

Alone, Zelda moves to a less religious neighborhood in Jerusalem and opens her home to young female boarders, becoming a close, maternal figure for many.

Zelda begins writing poetry while attending a religious teachers college in 1950. Her poetry is enormously popular with readers of all backgrounds, in Israel and abroad, and garners many prizes. Her language is distinctive, filled with allusions to Hasidic folklore and Jewish theological terms and “rich with imagery that is at once sensual and spiritual.”[1]

Amos Oz, the acclaimed novelist, is one of her students. In his memoir, he writes of her:

strange, anarchic Hebrew, a Hebrew belonging to … Hasidic tales and folk tales, a Hebrew overflowing with Yiddish, violating every rule, mixing feminine with masculine, present with past, noun with adjective — a sloppy, even muddled Hebrew. But what vitality there was. … And what strange, hypnotic sweetness there was in her tales about all kinds of miracles! As though the writer dipped the letters in wine: The words went spinning in the mouth.[2]

Zelda’s poem “For Every Person There Is a Name” is recited each year on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in Israel. The poem can be read here.

Zelda dies April 30, 1984, on Yom HaShoah.