Ilana Rovina was extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, especially during the Yom Kippur War when she traveled constantly to the front lines to sing to the troops.
By GREER FAY CASHMANIlana Rovina(photo credit: HANANIA HERMAN)
If you say the name Rovina in Israel, the immediate association is with the great Russian-born actress Hanna Rovina, who was a member of the Habimah Theater in Moscow, which she joined in 1917, and was subsequently among the founders of Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv in the second half of the 1940s.Rovina had a passionate romance with fellow Russian immigrant and celebrated poet Alexander Penn, who was married at the time and the father of two children, a factor that did not prevent him from sharing his manhood with other women.A love child named Ilana was born out of his relationship with Rovina. Ilana Rovina was both a singer and an actress, but focused more on singing.She was extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, especially during the Yom Kippur War when she traveled constantly to the front lines to sing to the troops.Possibly because she had grown up with a highly dramatic mother who was onstage even when she wasn’t, Ilana Rovina never played the diva. She was always friendly, good-humored and down to earth.While still a young woman, she was married to actor and director Uri Zohar, but the marriage did not last. Zohar, who was the second of her four husbands, later became religious and abandoned the entertainment industry. Rovina also left her profession.In the early 1990s, Rovina went to London, where she remained for 14 years, returning home in 2006 at the age of 73. After not singing professionally for some 30 years, she attempted a comeback at the smaller auditorium at Tzavta in Tel Aviv, but few members of the public remembered her.In her absence abroad, her recordings were occasionally played on radio in programs dedicated to golden oldies, but unlike some others of her generation who succeeded in maintaining a following, she did not, although she did renew acquaintances and revive old friendships with other singers and musicians.Rovina, who was ill with cancer in the final years of her life, also contracted coronavirus, from which she died on Sunday at age 86.She is survived by a daughter, and was buried on Sunday evening at Hayarkon Cemetery.
