Bracha Zefira

The Israel Philatelic Federation issued a stamp in her honor in 2012. Streets in Jerusalem and Beersheba were named for her. The Tel Aviv municipality posted a commemorative plaque in her honor in 2008.

Zefira died on 1 April 1990 and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv. News of her death was not broadcast in the media and her funeral was sparsely attended.

Zefira published her autobiography, Kolot Rabim ("Many Voices"), in 1978. The book details "the folk songs of Oriental Jews in Israel, and songs of the Bedouin and the peasants, which had influenced the songs of the Land of Israel in the 1920s and 1930s". In 1989, Zefira released a recording of her poems.

In 1966, Zefira received the Engel Prize for introducing Eastern melodies into Israeli music, symphonies, and folk songs over a 30-year career.

Zefira appeared on concert stages in Palestine to critical acclaim from 1940 to 1947. In 1942, she performed with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, becoming the first soloist to sing Middle Eastern Jewish and Ladino songs with that group. In 1948, she launched a two-and-a-half-year European and U.S. tour, which included performances in displaced persons camps sponsored by the Jewish Agency and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. A New York Times review of her first U.S. recital in May 1949 noted: "[I]t was the exotic nature of her interpretations that gave them an air of novelty and lent them special fascination". In 1950, she sang in a Histadrut Hanukkah Festival at Carnegie Hall. She gave her farewell performance at Town Hall on 6 April 1950. The latter concert included "traditional, folk, shepherd and children's songs" based on "authentic Hebrew melodies", and "love songs, prayers, psalms, and poems" from Yemenite, Persian, and Ladino traditions, accompanied by a 35-piece orchestra.

Zefira's popularity in Israel waned in the 1950s, possibly because of public dissatisfaction with her choice of art music over Hebrew song. In 1959, she contended that an accident had permanently damaged her vocal cords, although she continued to perform on occasion before small audiences. In the 1960s, she studied drawing in Israel and abstract painting in Paris, and mounted a few exhibitions. She gave her last concert in the mid-1970s at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Zefira was also noted for her performance style. She wore exotic, Yemenite-styled clothing and jewelry, and performed in bare feet. This costuming "evoked the myths about women of the Orient". She accentuated her performances with dramatic hand gestures. In 1949 the American-British sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein created a bronze sculpture of her hand in one of its expressive poses.

Over the following decade, Zefira called on numerous other composers not to improvise arrangements for her songs, as Nardi had done, but to arrange the melodies that she sang for them. These composers specialized in art music rather than Hebrew song, composing works for piano, chamber music ensemble, and orchestra. Zefira began billing herself as a classical rather than popular singer. While Zefira wanted her new composers to hear the songs firsthand from the families and members of the ethnic groups she sourced, they preferred to hear her sing and compose the arrangement accordingly. Paul Ben-Haim, who wrote a total of 35 arrangements for Zefira, preferred Sephardi songs; Ödön Pártos composed arrangements for her Yemenite songs; and Marc Lavry opted to arrange "songs with a light and danceable style". Hanoch Jacoby also composed numerous arrangements for Zefira, including classical chamber ensemble and trumpet-only accompaniment. The British composer Benjamin Frankel created arrangements for Zefira's Columbia recordings and her 1948 concert at Wigmore Hall, London. Zefira also collaborated with the composers Alexander Uriah Boskovich, Mendel Mahler-Kelkshtein, Noam Sheriff, and Ben-Zion Orgad.

Zefira and Nardi parted ways both professionally and personally in 1939. Zefira wanted to add works by other composers, notably Yedidia Admon, Emanuel Amiran, and Matityahu Shelem, to their repertoire, but Nardi refused. The couple divorced in 1939 but continued to perform together until July of that year. Zefira began collaborating with other composers while Nardi pursued his concert career with other singers. Nardi sued Zefira to obtain the copyrights for their joint compositions, but Zefira proved to the court that she had been the one who had sourced the original material.

Zefira and Nardi married in 1931 and embarked on a successful local and international career. In addition to appearing in concert halls, kibbutzim, and schools in Palestine, they performed in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, Jewish venues in Europe, and in the United States. On a 1937 U.S. tour, they recorded three phonograph records for Columbia Records.

Born in Jerusalem to Yemenite Jewish immigrants, she was orphaned of both parents by the age of three. She was raised by a succession of Sephardi Jewish foster families in the city and imbibed the musical tradition of each, as well as the local Arabic songs. She rose to stardom in the 1930s with her musical interpretations of Yemenite and Middle Eastern Jewish folk songs, accompanied by Western arrangements on piano by Nahum Nardi. In the 1940s she began collaborating with art music composers such as Paul Ben-Haim, Marc Lavry, Alexander Uriah Boskovich, Noam Sheriff, and Ben-Zion Orgad, performing her songs with classical music ensembles and orchestras. She was popular in Palestine, Europe, and the United States. In 1966, she received the Engel Prize for her musical contribution.

In 1930 the pair returned to Palestine. Zefira continued collecting folk songs from Middle Eastern Jewish, Arab, and Bedouin sources, to which Nardi wrote piano arrangements. Among Zefira's sources were old women from Middle Eastern Jewish communities; Yitzhak Navon, the scion of a Sephardic family; and Yehiel Adaki, a Yemenite musicologist. Zefira sang the Sephardi and Yemenite songs in their original languages and appended Hebrew lyrics to the Arab and Bedouin songs. Nardi also composed children's songs. The two performed a concert called Mi- Zimrat haaretz ("Songs of Palestine"), which included "songs from Yemen, Arab songs, shepherd's tunes, traditional zemirot, prayers and Sephardi songs".

Blending Zefira's Oriental Jewish songs with Nardi's Western musical arrangements, the two first appeared together in concert in Berlin in 1929 and went on to perform in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Nardi wrote arrangements for the songs Zefira had heard as a child, including Yemenite, Persian, and Bukharan Jewish songs, Bedouin songs, and melodies of Palestinian Arabs. Zefira sang and added dramatic gestures to her performances, which were favorably received by critics. An advertisement for one of their shows in Poland in 1929 in the Yiddish Tagblatt newspaper in Lublin showed a picture of Zefira dressed in traditional Yemenite garb and jewelry, with bare feet and uncovered arms, which "evoked the myths about women of the Orient".

In 1927, Zefira was accepted into the Palestine Theatre and its acting studio, founded by Menachem Gnessian. However, the theatre produced only a few plays before closing that same year. Zefira then joined the satirical theatre company HaKumkum (The Kettle), acting and singing with the company until it disbanded in 1929.

Zefira met Russian-born pianist Nahum Nardi at one of her performances in the Berlin Jewish community center. Nardi had immigrated to Palestine in 1923, but returned to Berlin in 1929 to pursue his musical studies. Zefira asked him to listen to some of her songs and to improvise arrangements for them. In her book she wrote:

The Sephardi-Ashkenazi partnership of Zefira and Nardi spearheaded the "ethnic integration" of Palestinian theatre and the local music scene in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Tel Aviv, "their appearances were considered an integral part of the Tel Aviv cultural scene. Huge crowds gathered at the Beit Ha-Am and Gan Rinah halls, where the duo appeared with no microphone, set or orchestral accompaniment". The first radio program aired by the Palestine Broadcasting Service from the Palace Hotel in Tel Aviv opened with Zefira singing "La-Midbar Sa'enu", which became "the first song to be broadcast in Palestine". Zefira and Nardi also appeared on a 1936 Carmel newsreel performing "Shir Ha- 'avoda Ve-ha-melakha" by Hayim Nahman Bialik.

Bracha Zefira (Hebrew: ברכה צפירה, also spelled Braha Tzfira; 15 April 1910 – 1 April 1990) was a pioneering Israeli folk singer, songwriter, musicologist, and actress of Yemenite Jewish origin. She is credited with bringing Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jewish music into the mix of ethnic music in Palestine to create a new "Israeli style", and opening the way for other Yemenite singers to succeed on the Israeli music scene. Her repertoire, which she estimated at more than 400 songs, included Yemenite, Bukharan, Persian, Ladino, and North African Jewish folk songs, and Arabic and Bedouin folk songs and melodies.

Bracha Zefira was born in Jerusalem, in the Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, in 1910. Her father, Yosef Zefira, had immigrated to the Land of Israel from Sanaa, Yemen, in 1877, and resided in the Nachalat Zvi neighborhood of Jerusalem. Here he married Na'ama Amrani, also a native of Yemen. Na'ama died giving birth to Bracha, and Yosef succumbed to typhus when Bracha was three years old.

Zefira was married to her first husband, pianist Nahum Nardi (1897–1984), from 1931 to 1939. They had one daughter, Na'amah Nardi (1932–1989), who also became a singer, performing at La Scala. In 1940 Zefira married Ben-Ami Zilber, a violinist with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra; they were married until his death in 1984. Their son, Ariel Zilber (born 1943), became a popular Israeli singer-songwriter.