Dora Gad

He had first changed his name to Yehezkel Goldberg after emigrating and later changed his surname to Gad. As he was a convinced Zionist and had received one of the coveted entry visas to the then British Mandate of Palestine, they left Austria for Palestine together in 1936. While the young couple managed to emigrate from Austria in time, other family members were not so fortunate. Her younger brother is said to have become a victim of the Shoah, but we know nothing about the fate of the other family members.

Like many German-speaking architects in exile, both of them found jobs in the offices of other German-speaking architects who had entered the country earlier. Dora Goldberg’s (later Gad) first job opportunity was in the architectural office of Oskar Kaufmann, who had been a sought-after architect in Berlin, especially as a theatre architect, until his emigration in 1933. Her husband joined the office of Alfred Abraham and was thus a colleague of another Austrian architect, Helene Roth, whom we have already introduced here as part of the research project.

By 1938, Dora Gad had already made the leap into self-employment and opened her first office for interior and furniture design. She quickly adapted to new opportunities and developed a light and modern style. Her designs were well received for their simplicity and the use of local materials. Over time, she had developed her own style, which was unmistakably influenced by her Austrian-European training, but was also strongly influenced by the energy of her new home. From the 1950s onwards, Gad increasingly used symbolic motifs in her decoration, with biblical, archaeological and Zionist themes that represented the ideal of the young state. To a certain extent, this became her trademark. At the same time, her artistic language adhered to modern aesthetics and represented the modesty, simplicity and innovative spirit of the young state. Dora Gad attached great importance to integrating Israeli art into the public spaces she designed and to promoting individual artists and Israeli art as a whole. Examples include her hotel interiors, but the public buildings she designed also bear her signature.

In 1942, Yehezkel Gad (formerly Heinrich Goldberg) joined his wife’s office and together they became a sought-after interior design firm in the 1940s and 1950s, realising both private and prestigious public projects, such as the interior of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s residence, the National Library and the EL AL offices. In the first decades after the founding of the Israeli state, Dora Gad played a key role in designing projects for the newly established national institutions, such as the parliament. Even after the death of her husband in 1958, she continued her work, from 1959 in a partnership with her former colleague Arieh Noy, which lasted until 1976. In 1959, she married Ephraim Ben-Artzi, a former general and managing director of the Israeli airline EL-AL. In order not to get into a labour law conflict, she did not accept any more orders for EL-AL equipment after the marriage, at least as long as her husband was managing director of EL-AL.

In 1966, she finally received the prestigious Israel Prize for Architecture for her design of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. She was the first woman ever to receive this prize. She also received other prizes, such as the Regalo d’Oro Prize and the Yakir Prize from the Council for a Beautiful Israel.

She worked well into old age. In 1994, at the age of 82, the renowned Tel Aviv Museum of Art organised a retrospective of Dora Gad’s successful 50-year career, which she unsurprisingly had conceived herself. Once again, she proved to be a pioneer: to date, no other female architect in Israel has been the subject of a retrospective.

She died in Caesarea in Israel at the end of 2003 at the age of 91.