Ofra Haza’s Yemenite Songs: Reclaiming Mizrahi Roots in Israeli Music

Ofra Haza was born in the Hatikvah area of Tel Aviv, the youngest of eight children, to a poor Yemenite immigrant family. She joined the Hatikvah Theater group at the age of thirteen and began singing Israeli pop music, winning the prize for “Female Singer of the Year” four years in a row and eventually representing Israel in the 1983 Eurovision song contest. But it was her album of Yemenite piyyutim (liturgical music) and street songs (Yemenite Songs, or Fifty Gates of Wisdom), a tribute to her family, that brought Haza international fame. One of the songs on the album (Im nin’alu), based on a seventeenth-century piyyut by Shalom Shabazi, was sampled in a popular hip hop song, propelling the song itself to hit status. In the 1990s, Haza’s international career was flourishing. In 1997, she married an Israeli businessman, Doron Ashkenazi, and left her long-time manager, Bezalel Aloni. After voicing the character of Yocheved in the Disney film The Prince of Egypt, and singing the opening song “Deliver Me,” Haza was beginning to write her own compositions. Tragically and suddenly, she died of pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, having apparently been HIV-positive for years.