Yocheved Weinfeld - Biography

Biography

Yocheved (Juki) Weinfeld (née Ewa Ernst) was born in 1947 in the Silesian city of Legnica (Poland), and lived in Wroclaw, also in Silesia. Before World War II, her father Natan Ernst (b.1909) was a prosperous manufacturer of men’s shirts in Przemysl, Poland and her mother, Klara Goldstein (1922–1973), had just graduated from the local vocational high school. Natan’s Parents were shot by the Nazis and he spent the war in hiding. Klara obtained false documents and, posing as an Aryan, served as a housekeeper for a German SS officer stationed in Poland. They met and married after the war.

In 1957 the Ernst family emigrated to Israel, and after a few months in Tel-Aviv settled in Givatayim, a town near Tel-Aviv. While Ewa, now Yocheved, was considered an overall gifted child, her exceptional talents in drawing, acting and writing received particular attention.

At the age of 16 she was taken on as a student by the prominent Israeli artist and teacher, Raffi Lavie, and before she was 20, her works were being shown alongside her mentor’s in exhibitions staged by the avant-garde group 10+. In 1979 she married David Weinfeld, then a Doctoral student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an Orthodox Jew. In 1977 the marriage ended in divorce. In 1980, Weinfeld married Steven Kasher and moved to New York. In 1985 she gave birth to their daughter Talia Kasher. In 1993 the couple divorced. (Based loosely on Dr. Gannit Ankori: Yocheved Weinfeld’s Portraits of the Self in Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 1989.)