Dvora Hacohen

Dvora Hacohen was born Dvora Klirs in Tiberias, in Mandatory Palestine, in 1936, to Yehuda Leib and Esther Feiga Klirs. She was a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Moshe Klirs, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Tiberias. As a teenager she volunteered teaching young offenders at a Jerusalem institution.

She graduated from the Efrata teachers college in Jerusalem and studied painting and sculpture at the Bezalel academy. She earned a BA in general history and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an MA with distinction in Jewish history at Tel Aviv University. In 1984 she received a PhD in sociology and anthropology from Bar-Ilan University for a dissertation on the great immigration to Israel and its absorption between 1948 and 1953, and she went on to postdoctoral research at Oxford University.

Hacohen spent her academic career at Bar-Ilan University, becoming a professor in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology and later professor emerita. From 1975 to 1992 she was scientific adviser on history and Jewish studies to Israeli Educational Television. Between 1986 and 1989 she was a research fellow at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute at Sde Boker and lectured in Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She was a visiting researcher at Oxford, Harvard, New York University and Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and in 2012 a visiting professor at Rutgers University.

Her research centred on immigration and absorption, the Yishuv and the early state. Using classified government and Jewish Agency records, she showed that the mass immigration of the 1950s was the product of contested political decisions, and examined debates over the melting pot, the education of immigrant children, transit camps and immigrant moshavim. She wrote ten books, edited 16 volumes and published more than a hundred articles and chapters, including Immigrants in Turmoil, The One Million Plan, The Grain and the Millstone, The Children of the Time and To Repair a Broken World. In the 1990s the Ministry of Education appointed her adviser on the absorption of children arriving from the former Soviet Union.

Hacohen was married to Rabbi Menachem Hacohen, rabbi of the Moshav Movement and a Labour Alignment member of the Knesset, until his death in August 2025. They had three children: Miron Hacohen, a lawyer and former Registrar of Cooperative Societies; Professor Aviad Hacohen, president of the Shaarei Mishpat Academic Center; and Dr. Hagit Hacohen-Wolf, an organisational psychologist. She lived in Jerusalem.

Dvora Hacohen died on 13 November 2026 at the age of 90. Her funeral was held the same day, a Friday, at Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem, as reported by Israel Hayom. No cause of death was reported.

Hacohen is regarded as one of the leading scholars of immigration and absorption in Israel. Her archival work overturned popular myths about the founding years of the state and gave a fuller picture of the political arguments behind mass immigration. Her history of Youth Aliyah and her biography of Henrietta Szold brought those subjects to Hebrew and English readers, and her advice to the education system helped shape the reception of a new generation of immigrant children in the 1990s.