Chana Orloff (; 12 July 1888 – 16 December 1968) was Ukrainian-born Israeli Art deco and figurative art sculptor. Biography Chana Orloff was born in Starokonstantinov Russian Empire (now Ukraine). She immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1905 and settled in Jaffa, where she found a job as a cutter and seamstress. Zvi Nishri (Orloff), the pioneer in physical education in Israel, was her brother. She joined Hapoel Hatzair workers movement. After five years in the country, she was offered a teaching position in cutting and dressmaking at Gymnasia Herzliya. She went to Paris to study fashion but chose art instead, enrolling in sculpture classes at the Académie Russe in Montparnasse. In 1916, she married Ary Justman, a Warsaw-born writer and poet. The couple had a son, but Ary died of influenza in the epidemic of 1919. When the Nazis invaded Paris, Orloff fled to Switzerland with her son and the Jewish painter Georges Kars. In February 1945, Kars committed suicide in Geneva, after which Orloff returned to Paris, to find that her house had been ransacked and the sculptures in her studio destroyed. Art career In Paris, Orloff became friendly with other young Jewish artists, among them Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine. In 1913, she exhibited in the Salon d'Automne. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Orloff began spending an increasing amount of time there. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art held an exhibition of 37 of her sculptures in 1949. She remained in Israel for about a year in order to complete a sculpture of David Ben-Gurion, The Hero Monument to the defenders of Ein Gev and The Motherhood Monument in memory of Chana Tuckman who died during the 1947–1949 Palestine war. After her return to Paris in 1950, Orloff received support and friendship from the Ukrainian-born artist Norman Carton to further grow her Parisian career using photography. She became a mentor to him. In addition to monuments, Orloff sculpted portraits of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and future Prime Minister Levi Eshkol; the architects Pierre Chareau, and Auguste Perret; painters Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Per Krohg; and the poets Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and Pierre Mac Orlan. . Orloff died in Israel on December 16, 1968. See also Visual arts in Israel Women of Israel References Further reading Birnbaum, Paula J. (forthcoming 2022) Chana Orloff: A Modern