Bar Belfer

Bar Belfer died on Sunday 8 November 2026, at the age of 37. Early reports, including Haaretz, did not give a cause. Hours later her talent agency, Zohar Jacobson, said she had died after a severe epileptic seizure, a statement repeated by Ynet and Mako.

A family death notice said, "The love of our heart is gone, and the song of her life stopped in the middle." The family asked for time and privacy to absorb the loss. Shaham, the Israeli union of performing artists, said it had received the news of her sudden death with shock and deep sorrow, remembering her as Tamar in Someone to Run With and as an actress, musician and creator whose life had been cut short.

Her funeral was set for 11:00 on Monday 9 November 2026 at Menuha Nekhona cemetery in Kfar Saba. A specific place of death beyond Israel was not published.

Bar Belfer was born on 26 January 1989 and grew up in Ramat HaSharon, north of Tel Aviv. Hebrew Wikipedia's infobox records Tel Aviv-Yafo as a birthplace, but the article text and Israeli news obituaries, including Ynet, Mako and News1, say she was born and raised in Ramat HaSharon. She studied in the music track at Alon High School there and was already involved in music as a teenager.

She was 17 when she was chosen to play Tamar in Someone to Run With. In a 2007 interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, later quoted by Ynet, she said she had nearly turned the part down. She told the filmmakers she was not an actress and did not really know how to sing, and that she was afraid of failing people who trusted her. After they called again she accepted, a decision that made her one of the most recognizable young faces in Israeli cinema of that decade.

She later studied at the Rimon School of Music, finishing in 2014, and at Tel Aviv University, where she completed work in philosophy and at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television and continued into a master's programme in the interdisciplinary arts track.

Belfer's breakthrough was the lead in Oded Davidoff's Someone to Run With (2006), adapted from David Grossman's novel. She played Tamar, a young musician who searches Jerusalem for her brother and is drawn into a dangerous plot involving neglected children. The film also starred Yuval Mendelson, Yonatan Bar-Or, Rinat Matatov and Tzachi Grad. Belfer was nominated for the 2006 Ophir Award for Best Actress, the youngest nominee that year alongside Ayelet Zurer, Gila Almagor and Assi Levi. In March 2007 the Miami International Film Festival gave her a special mention, and in June 2007 she won the Israeli Television Academy Award for best actress in a miniseries, television film or drama series, ahead of Keren Mor, Anat Waxman and Yevgenia Dodina, after the story was also presented as a television miniseries.

In July 2007 she enlisted and joined Army Radio as a current affairs reporter, later editing the foreign news desk. The Jerusalem Post described her as a journalist when it reported her 2010 accident. While still in uniform she continued to act, appearing in 2008 in the Yes series Screens, alongside Orna Pitussi and Uri Omanuti.

After a long recovery from the 2010 crash she returned to broadcasting and to music. In 2015 she appeared on Yoav Kutner's Army Radio programme and performed original songs she had written at Rimon. Her stage debut followed on 26 December 2015 at Tel Aviv Port. From 2017 she worked at Kan Culture as a reporter, producer and presenter.

She kept acting as well: Mama's Angel (2016); the third season of Betulot (2018), as Tehel; Ram Nehari's Don't Forget Me (2019); A Destroying Angel (2023) on Kan 11, as Shipi; and Rona Sofer's short film Tell Me About That Day (2024), which was screened at the Jerusalem Women's Film Festival in October 2026. In that film she played Reli, a woman living with a physical disability who travels through the Arava with a caregiver.

On 23 March 2010 Belfer was critically injured on the Ayalon Highway in the Tel Aviv area, near the Jewish National Fund interchange. Contemporary reports said her car had stalled on a traffic island. When she got out to inspect the fault, another car struck her. She was thrown onto the road and taken unconscious to Ichilov Hospital with multiple injuries. She spent weeks in intensive care (accounts from the time vary between about two and three weeks) and was transferred on 16 May 2010 to rehabilitation at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. The accident left her with memory loss and damage to speech, vision and walking. She had to relearn basic tasks and to recognize people around her.

She spoke about the recovery in the 2018 television programme Anashim (People). She said the hardest part was feeling lesser than others, and that what had gone was not memory itself so much as the realistic memory of who she loved. Asked whether she could one day leave the accident behind her, she said it had been hard and that she had suffered, but that her life was now in a good place, with work, art and the person she loved.

In 2018 she married Shahar Cohen at the Barbie club in Tel Aviv. Yehuda Adar, the musician who had taught her at Rimon, officiated under the wedding canopy. Their daughter was born in 2023. Further private details, including the child's name, were not published in the death notices.

Belfer is remembered first for Tamar, the withdrawn young singer at the centre of Someone to Run With, a performance that made her, at 17, an Ophir nominee and an Israeli Television Academy Award winner. She then built a second public life in radio, first at Army Radio and later at Kan Culture, and a third as a singer of her own songs after finishing at Rimon.

The 2010 accident, and her return to broadcasting within months, became part of how Israeli audiences understood her determination. Later roles, including A Destroying Angel and Tell Me About That Day, showed her still working on screen in the 2020s. Tributes after her death dwelt on how much creating she had still seemed to have ahead of her.