Pnina Gary

Pnina Gary (Hebrew: פנינה גרי; née Dromi; September 24, 1927 – August 2, 2023) was an Israeli actress and theatre director. Pnina Dromi was born and raised in Nahalal, Mandatory Palestine, the daughter of Yosef Dromi (previously Kotlar) and Tzipora Ostrowski. Her parents made aliyah from the Ukraine in 1919. Gary attended to Nahalal's Agricultural High School, and later the teachers' seminar to become a kindergarten teacher.

In March 1948, during Israel's war for independence, just a few days before she was supposed to marry Eli, the son of Rachel Yanait and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (later to be the second president of Israel), her Palmach member husband-to-be was killed in an Arab ambush in the fields of their kibbutz, Beit Keshet.In September 1948, trying to recover from the outcome of the Beit Keshet battle, she volunteered to participate in an expedition of teachers to the DP camps around Munich. She was sent to help set up kindergartens in the camps and work with Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Six months later, she was sent to reside in Ulm, in order to do the same work in the DP camps around Stuttgart.

In Munich, she met her husband, Robert Gary, a Jewish American journalist, who reported from the camps. They married in Germany in late 1949 and two weeks later moved to Israel. The couple had two daughters, Dorit and Meirav. Through Meirav, she is the grandmother of rapper Michael Cohen.

Gary wrote a weekly column for Davar, an Israeli newspaper, for two years.

Pnina Gary died in Tel Aviv on August 2, 2023, at the age of 95.