Rahel Bluwstein

(1890 -1931)

Rahel was born in Vyatka in Russia in 1890 and arrived in Eretz-Israel at the age of 19. She first worked as a laborer in Rehovot and later joined a training farm near the Kinneret. In 1913 she went to France to study agriculture and from there to Russia where she contracted tuberculosis. In 1919 she returned to Eretz-Israel on board the ship "Ruslan," and for a while lived in Deganyah.

Her poetry is set in the pastoral countryside of Eretz-Israel although her personal struggles add a sad and nostalgic mood to their reading. Many of her poems were set to music both during her lifetime and thereafter. She is buried in the kibbutz Kinneret cemetery alongside many of the socialist ideologues and pioneers of the second and third waves of immigration to Eretz-Israel.

Sources: The Jewish Agency for Israel and The World Zionist Organization