Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, a Lithuanian-born Israeli Yiddish poet and educator, died on March 22 in Herzliya, Israel. She was 98.

During WWII, she spent two years in the Vilna ghetto, after which she was sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga. There, she started writing poetry to cheer up fellow inmates. She was liberated in 1945. In 1947, she made Aliyah and joined Kibbutz HaMa’apil. At her kibbutz, she taught children and also joined a Yiddish poets group and wrote and published her first volume of poetry.

She received the Itzik Manger Prize in 1984 and the Chaim Zhitlowsky Prize in 1998, among other prized throughout her writing career. She published nine volumes of poetry.