Otte Wallish

Who was Otte Wallish?

Otte Wallish was an emigre to Israel who established himself as a graphic designer and contributed to the symbolic self-representation of the Jewish state.

Wallish was born in Sudetenland and served in the Czech army. He had jobs with the Jewish National Fund and United Israel Appeal. He married and then emigrated by boat to Palestine in 1934, a time of increasing peril for European Jews. His wife joined him in 1935; a sibling survived the Holocaust and lived in the Czech Republic. The couple had two children and settled in a Herzliya house with Bauhaus furniture. He used the German Wallisch and, after moving to Israel, adopted the English Wallish transliteration of his name in Hebrew.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Wallish worked on artistic arrangement, statistical graphs and other design aspects for books. In 1929, his own book was published, ABC: Ein Bilderbuch.

In 1936, Wallish set up a design studio in a building in Nahalat Binyamin, Tel Aviv, that had been chosen as a national landmark. His design studio doubled as a kind of front for SHA'I, the Haganah's secret service.