Bracha Peli was unique among the literary community of pre-state Palestine, inasmuch as she created what was probably the most successful and dynamic publishing house in the country at the time, stressing distribution and sales rather than the content and editorial aspects which are the usual focus of publishing aspirations and inspiration.

Bronya Kutzenok was born in 1892 in Starovitzky, a village in Tsarist Russia (today Ukraine) to a family of devout A member of the hasidic movement, founded in the first half of the 18th century by Israel ben Eliezer Ba'al Shem Tov.Hasidic Jews, adherents of the Admor (title given to hasidic rabbis) of Chernobyl. She was the first girl of seven children—five boys and two girls. Her father, Shmuel Kutzenok, was a wealthy lumber merchant whose main trade was providing timber for artillery wagons for the Russian army. Her mother, Sarah, who kept the village general store, was less observant and had a mostly secular Russian education.

Bronya learnt to read Russian at an early age and was exposed to a wide range of books, from her father’s religious works to her mother’s collection of classic and modern Russian novels and periodicals. Since there was no school in the village, a tutor was hired to teach the boys Bible Lit. "teaching," "study," or "learning." A compilation of the commentary and discussions of the amora'im on the Mishnah. When not specified, "Talmud" refers to the Babylonian Talmud.Talmud, and Hebrew grammar. Her own early education was gained by listening to her brothers’ lessons; by the age of six she had her own tutor for reading and writing and was soon able to read Hebrew and Yiddish fluently, in addition to Russian.

In 1905 she persuaded her family to allow her to continue her education and left for the gymnasium in Kiev. Three days later, caught up in the early days of the Revolution and in a pogrom in the town, she was forced to return to the village. Returning to Kiev in 1907 at the age of fourteen, she was accepted into the sixth grade and graduated three years later. Intending to enroll at the city’s ancient St. Vladimir University, her eye was caught by the adjacent College of Economics and on the spur of the moment she enrolled there instead (one of only two women). She graduated three years later with a final paper on “The History of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.”

Meanwhile, her mother was stricken with tuberculosis and Bronya took her first to San Remo and then to the Tyrol. None of the treatments helped and the women eventually returned to Starovitzky where her mother died at the age of forty-eight. The outbreak of World War I found Bronya back in the village, where her life was turned upside down with the arrival of Meir Pilipovetsky as a young tutor for the local Jewish children. Meir was born in 1894 in Didovshina, a small Ukrainian (Yiddish) Small-town Jewish community in Eastern Europe.shtetl. A member of a Zionist youth movement, he dreamt of settling in Palestine. Meir and Bronya fell deeply in love but marriage was strongly opposed by her family because of the perceived gap in class, academic accomplishments, wealth, and—especially—the two-and-a-half-year age difference. Nevertheless, they determined to marry and did so with no guests or ceremony in October 1914. Their first son, Alexander, was born in Kiev in 1915.

That year, on the way to a dental appointment in the small town of Malin, near Zhitomir, Bronya happened to notice a large empty building. On the spur of the moment she decided to open a gymnasium (high school) for Jewish boys. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, many Jewish families had sought refuge in Ukraine, and four hundred students signed up for the first year—the first time Bronya had actually worked for a living. However, the fighting between the Red and White factions eventually reached Malin and the family had to flee back to the village. As “capitalists” (Meir had opened a factory manufacturing cloth bags for sugar), they could not return to Malin after the Bolshevik victory.

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In 1929, following the Wall Street crash and its worldwide repercussions, credits and payments virtually ceased and Moriah, in common with many Palestinian companies, found itself on the brink of bankruptcy. In a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, Meir entered into a partnership dealing in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, land purchase, building and insurance, called Peless. Bracha meanwhile kept the book distribution business open while trying to dispose of the remaining book stocks. Despite the recession and the virtual cessation of publishing in the country, and despite all advice to the contrary, Bracha decided to embark upon what was to become the crown of her life’s work, the creation in September 1932 of a new Hebrew publishing house, Massadah. In her memoirs she wrote that at the back of her mind was a famous Hebrew phrase, Sheinit Mezadah lo tipol (Masada shall not fall again, a line from the epic poem “Massadah” by Yizhak Lamdan, 1899–1954).

The first book to be published was The General Encyclopedia, edited by Professor Joseph Klausner (1874–1958). Originally planned as one volume, it was eventually published in six (the final volume in 1936), with contributions by many of the leading academics of the contemporary Jewish community. The encyclopedia was sold by original selling methods, unknown in the country at the time, which subsequently became the hallmark of the company—such as countrywide door-to-door selling, sales to institutions and workers’ committees, etc. The encyclopedia continued to be sold for fifteen years, until it was voluntarily withdrawn in favor of the new Encyclopaedia Hebraica. The General Encyclopedia was followed by a number of multi-volume series, including the noted Bible with commentary by Samuel Leib Gordon (1965–1933), an encyclopedia of psychology, a history of European music and the Aviv Encyclopedia for youth (the first to be printed in color). Thus a firm basis was established for Massadah, making it, in time, one of the largest and most successful publishing houses in Palestine and subsequently in Israel.

Massadah took over several other publishers, such as Stiebel, a distinguished Hebrew publishing house established in Russia before the revolution. Peli also embarked on a series of co-publishing ventures, especially with the Bialik Institute, owned by the World Zionist Organization, which led to the publication of such monumental works as Wars of the Jews and Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a series of full-color art albums—the first in the country—including volumes on Leonardo de Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo.

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