Molly Lyons Bar-David

Molly Lyons Bar-David (also known as Malka Bar-David) was born in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Raised by Zionist parents, she shared her family’s dream of one day relocating to Israel. In 1936, at the age of 25, Bar-David and her sisters met their parents in the village of Gan HaSharon, Israel, where they quickly joined the Haganah and learned to protect their new home from the Arab Revolt. Bar-David put her literary skills to use by recording her wartime experiences for publication in newspapers across Canada.

After moving to Jerusalem, she became a staff member at the Palestine Post and contributed to several Israeli and Anglo-Jewish news sources. When the Arab Israeli War erupted in 1948, Bar-David once again dedicated herself to the war effort by aiding and caring for refugee children alongside her own family with husband Jaap Bar-David—a literary agent and war veteran. Her long running column “Diary of a Jerusalem Housewife” for Hadassah Newsletter made Bar-David a household name among American-Jewish readers and would lead to a lifelong partnership with the organization.

She traveled to the United States for the first time in 1951 to appear in a series of lectures about life in Israel—one of many speaking engagements arranged by Hadassah—and would go on to attend a host of stateside events as both a connoisseur of Jewish cuisine and a representative of the Israeli people. The publication of her autobiography titled My Promised Land in 1953 was followed by two internationally acclaimed cookbooks: Jewish Cooking for Pleasure and The Israeli Cook Book.

Source: Center for Jewish History