Biography
Sophie (Shifra) Pinkhof was born on 11.5.1900 in Holland and died in 1987 in Israel. Her mother was Adeline de Beer and her father was Menachem Herman Pinkhof, a doctor murdered by the Nazis in 1943. Sophie had seven siblings. She trained in Amsterdam to become a high school educator and taught mainly Judaism and Hebrew to children and adults and also engaged in educational and youth-oriented work in Amsterdam. She started as an assistant in Beit Israel, a Jewish welfare organization and soon rose to become the vice president of the organization. She then immigrated to Palestine in 1935 and began working in a girls' home of the Mizrachi Women’s Organization as a secretary. Later, she worked as a social worker and, in 1962, she published a paper in the Saad Journal, Israel’s journal of social work, about the institutional placement of children and its negative outcomes. Later in her life, during the 1980s, she wrote short stories and translated books from Dutch to Hebrew.