Bente Kahan
Bente Kahan (born 23 September 1958 in Oslo) is a Norwegian singer, actress, director and playwright. She specializes in Yiddish folk music and theatre and has lived in Poland since 2002.
Her parents were Holocaust survivors. Her mother escaped to Sweden during World War II; her father, Rabbi Hermann Kahan, survived the Holocaust.
She studied performing arts at Tel Aviv University and at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.
Kahan began acting in 1981 in Tel Aviv and Norway. She first sang on stage in Oslo in 1983 in a Yiddish cabaret show Over Byen. With Ellen Foyn Bruun she co-wrote three plays: Bessie (1986), Letter Without a Stamp (1988), and Stemmer fra Theresienstadt (1995). In 1990 she founded Teater Dybbuk in Oslo.
In 2001 she moved with her family to Wrocław, Poland, and she is the director of the Wrocław Centre for Jewish Culture and Education. In 2006 she founded the Bente Kahan Foundation to promote mutual respect and human rights through Holocaust history. The foundation led the restoration of the White Stork Synagogue in Wrocław, completed in 2010. In 2013 she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for intercultural dialogue and preserving Jewish heritage in Lower Silesia.
Music and artistry: She mainly sings in Yiddish but also performs in Ladino, Hebrew and other languages. She works as a singer, actress, musician and director, often in klezmer and related styles.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:36 (CET).