On July 19^th, scbwi Israel hosted Judye Groner, editor of Kar-Ben books from the U.S.A.

40 people showed up for the event, held at the Comics Museum of Holon. The audience included children book authors, illustrators and publishers.

Judye told us about Kar-Ben books, which publishes children books with Jewish themes. She also gave an interesting overview of the Jewish book market in the U.S.A and how it has changed over the years. Judye gave many examples for stories and books Kar-Ben published to give us a clear picture of the type of books they are looking for. By the end of her talk Judye answered questions, and took manuscript submissions and illustration samples from attendees.

Scbwi Israel thanks Judye for her interesting talk and hopes many beautiful children books will result from this event…

Here are some photos from the event, taken by our scbwi member, the illustrator Liat Aluf.

On April 11th we had a scbwi-Israel meeting. The lovely illustrator Rachel Knopp hosted the event at her house. 20 members showed up.

We had two talks at this evening:

The first was with Michal Chesla, an Israeli childern book agent, who sells rights for Israeli books to publishers around the world. She talked about the international market of children books, as she sees it. The second talk was mine, as I shared with the members my exciting experience at the SCBWI NY winter conference, and gave a summary of some interestingt information I heared at the conference.



But there was one more important reason for this gathering, which was kept as a secret...

We decided to take the oppurtunity to thank Anna Levine, our former RA, who founded scbwi Israel and served as the RA for 14 years! One of our members wrote Anna a very touching letter and read it out loud. We gave Anna a book as a present (bought at the NY conference...) and then we gave her a framed picture with a collage of greetings and illustrations by our members, expressing their thanks for Anna.



It was a very special moment...

so again - THANK YOU DEAR ANNA!



Miri Leshem-Pelly

RA SCBWI Israel



In the photo: Anna Levine with the thank-you collage and me