Background
Naomi Sapir was born in Kvutzat Kinneret, a kibbutz her parents had helped found, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
composer singer writer songwriter poet
Naomi Sapir was born in Kvutzat Kinneret, a kibbutz her parents had helped found, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
In the 1950s she served in the Israeli Defense Force"s Nahal entertainment troupe, and studied music at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, and in Tel Aviv with Paul Ben-Haim, Abel Ehrlich, Ilona Vincze-Kraus and Josef Tal.
Marriage and family Shemer did her own songwriting and composing, set famous poems to music, such as those of the Israeli poet, Rachel, and the American Walt Whitman. She also translated and adapted popular songs into Hebrew, such as the Beatles song "Let lieutenant Be" in 1973. In 1963, she composed "Hurshat Ha"Eucalyptus" ("The Eucalyptus Grove"), a song that evokes Kvutzat Kinneret where she was born.
lieutenant was covered in a recent version by Ishtar.
She wrote it for the Israeli Music Festival. After Israel"s victory in the Six-Day War that year, she added another verse celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem.
The song "gained the status of an informal second national anthem." "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav" and other songs have come over time to be associated increasingly with right-wing politics and the Israeli settlement movement. Shemer continued to write her own songs.
She died in 2004 of cancer, aged 73.
Shortly before her death, she wrote to a friend, saying she had used a Basque folk melody as the basis for her 1967 "anthem," "Jerusalem of Gold". She had always denied it before. The friend and her family decided to publish the accountant
In 1962, singer Paco Ibanez performed the Basque melody, "Pello Joxepe" (Joseph The Fool), in Israel, when Shemer might have heard lieutenant
He said musicians borrow music without knowing where their inspiration comes from. Although he heard the similarity in her melody, he did not think it significant and said she should not have felt guilty about lieutenant
