Ehud Manor

Ehud Manor with his wife Ofra Fuchs

Ehud Manor ( Hebrew אהוד מנור; born July 13, 1941 in Binyamina , Mandate Palestine as Ehud Weiner ; died April 12, 2005 in Tel Aviv , Israel ) was an Israeli songwriter , radio and television presenter and translator . In 1998 he was awarded the Israel Prize .

life and work

Plaque on Ehud Manor's home in Tel Aviv

Ehud Weiner was born in Binyamina in 1941. His parents immigrated to Palestine from Belarus in 1936 ; he had an older and a younger brother. After his military service, he studied psychology and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . In 1962 he was employed as a music editor for the state radio and in the same year changed his family name to Manor. In 1963 he traveled to New York , where he began studying mass media and met Ofra Fuchs, who was then studying at the "Lee Strasberg" drama school. He was then married to her for 40 years and had three children with her. The son Yehuda is named after Weiner Ehud younger brother Jude, who in 1968 in the war of attrition fell and the song "My little brother Jude wrote" in his memory Ehud. While studying at Cambridge University in 1981 , Manor worked as a correspondent for the Jediot Acharonot newspaper . In 1998 he received the Israel Prize in the Hebrew Song category . In March 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Bar Ilan University . Immediately afterwards, Ehud Manor, who was a long-time chain smoker and suffered from lung cancer , died of cardiac arrest on April 12, 2005 in his apartment in Tel Aviv .

Ehud Manor wrote texts for over 1000 songs, some of which became internationally known and are still broadcast on Israeli radio today. Nurit Hirsch was the first to set his texts to music. A long-term collaboration with Matti Caspi began in the 1970s, and with Boaz Sharabi in the 1980s . A-Ba-Ni-Bi , with Manor's text in the B language and music by Nurit Hirsch, won first prize at the 1978 Eurovision competition in Paris . Manor's lyrics have been interpreted by Ilanit , Jardena Arasi , Rivka Zohar , Chava Alberstein , Riki Gal , Sarit Hadad , Ofra Haza and Shlomo Artzi , among others .

Manor also translated around 600 lyrics into Hebrew, as well as numerous dramas, comedies and musicals. After successfully staging his Hebrew version of Hair , he translated plays by Shakespeare , Molière , Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams as well as the musicals Chicago , Cabaret , Sweeney Todd , West Side Story , Les Misérables and The Threepenny Opera .

Web links

Commons : Ehud Manor  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Obituary in Haaretz , April 13, 2005 (English)
• Obituary in The Guardian , April 20, 2005