Yehuda Yaari

Yehuda Ya’ari (1900-1982) was born in Tarnobrzeg, Galicia, to a Hassidic family. In 1920 he joined a group of Zionist Socialists and together they arrived in Eretz Israel. Ya’ari became a leading member of the Labor Brigade that built the Afula-Nazareth highway. In 1923 he was one of the founding members of Kibbutz Beit Alpha, and in 1925 he returned to Jerusalem, where he became one of the first workers in the National Library. He spent the late 1920s and the early 1930s earning a degree in Library Science in the U.S. and teaching in Canada. He returned in 1933 and went to work for the National University Library. Later, he filled senior posts in the cultural department of the Foreign Office and as consul general in Amsterdam. Ya’ari published his first novel in 1937. In 1969 he received the Brenner Literary Prize.