Biography

Riki Gal (Hebrew: ריקי גל, born July 7, 1950, in Jerusalem) is an Israeli singer. Gal, who reached the height of her career in the 1980s, sings a mix of blues, folk and pop. Rivka Menashe (later Riki Gal) was born in 1950 to an Orthodox family in the poor neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. In her early years, Gal experienced a hard childhood: her parents divorced when she was two years old and she was taken to an institution in Kfar Saba along with her brother Menachem

. Her mother was then able to raise the children on her own, but later could not afford the cost of growth, so she handed her children over to the nuns who raised them with strict discipline.

In 1968, at the age of seventeen, Gal was drafted into the navy, where she began her music career. After completing her military service in 1971, she married Yisrael Poliakov of the HaGashash HaHiver trio. The couple divorced in 1975. Following the divorce, Gal flew to New York, where she got married the second time. This marriage also ended in a divorce. Subsequently, Gal returned to Israel. From 1990 to 2002, she was married to the news reporter of Channel 1 Ori Cohen Aharonov. In 1991, they had a daughter named Leary.