Ofra Haza

Ofra Haza (born November 19, 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel—died February 23, 2000, Ramat Gan) was an Israeli singer and pop star known for blending traditional Yemeni and Jewish folk elements with current pop music trends. Known as the “Madonna of the East,” Haza represented Israel in the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest and maintained her national and international celebrity presence until her tragic AIDS-related death at age 42.

Early life

Haza was born in the Hatikvah quarter of Tel Aviv, a working-class neighborhood known as a melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. Her parents, who were among some 50,000 Yemeni Jews airlifted from Yemen to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet (1949–50), raised her along with her eight siblings in the rich Jewish-Yemenite musical tradition. Her mother, who was a professional singer in Yemen, encouraged Haza from childhood to sing in the local choir and participate in the protest group Hatikvah Quarter Theater Workshop. In 1973 Haza performed her first hit, “Gaʿaguʿim,” at the workshop and was invited to perform the song “Shabbat ha-Malkah” at the Mizrahi Music Festival in 1974, which gained her critical acclaim within the Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish community. After appearing in a variety of television and radio shows, Haza released her first album at age 18. Upon completing mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces, she decided to pursue a singing career.

Early career

Haza struggled to find songwriters willing to work with her until Bezalel Aloni, the director of Hatikvah Quarter Theater Workshop, took on the dual role of her songwriter and manager. With Aloni’s assistance, Haza’s fame quickly grew, as she mixed her Yemenite musical heritage with inspiration from the Beatles and Elvis Presley to make a new, unique genre of pop music. Her early lyrics expressed her battles both as a woman navigating a conservative and traditional community and as a Mizrahi Jew facing discrimination from all sides.

Music and film career

Haza released about two dozen albums and singles through her career. Although her early albums had little success, in 1979 the song “Shir ha-Frichah,” which Haza performed in the film Shlagger, became her breakout hit. She then became one of Israel’s top musical artists in the 1980s.

In 1983 Haza broke into the international scene when she was chosen to represent Israel in Eurovision, a singing competition broadcast across Europe and a few other countries, including Israel. She won second place with the song “Chai,” written by Ehud Manor and Avi Toledano. Her Eurovision appearance launched her career to new heights and brought her next album, Shirei Teiman (1984), to an international audience. Haza continued to achieve great success abroad and sold more than a million copies of her mixed Hebrew- and English-language album Shaday (1988). Following the success of Shaday, Haza began recording albums of only English-language music, beginning with Desert Wind (1989), which she promoted with a U.S. tour; her music was becoming a world beat, a music style with global appeal. In 1993 she earned a Grammy nomination for best world music album with Kirya (1992). In film, Haza had a supporting role in the animated movie The Prince of Egypt (1998) as the voice of Yochevet, the mother of the biblical figure Moses, and she contributed to the soundtrack of American Psycho (2000) with “Im Ninʿalu.”

Personal life

Haza spent many years as an ambassador of the Israeli music scene. She was especially known for the religious undertones in her music, a clean public image, and a general lack of relationships or scandals. In 1987 a Cessna aircraft carrying Haza and her manager, Aloni, crashed into a mountain on the border of Israel and Jordan. After several hours of searching the nearby desert, the country rejoiced when she was found unharmed. Haza had no publicly known paramours until she fell in love with Tel Aviv businessman Doron Ashkenazi, whom she married in 1997. In February 2000 Haza was admitted to the hospital and died 13 days later of AIDS-related organ failure. Her fans struggled in the wake of her death to reconcile her clean public image with her disease, which was associated with drug use and sexual promiscuity despite being transmissible through other means. Some speculated that she had contracted HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) from her husband, who died a year later from a drug overdose.