Sheffi Paz, Israeli Activist Against African Immigration, Dies at 74

Sheffi Paz, an Israeli activist against African immigration to Israel who lived in south Tel Aviv, died on Monday, October 26, 2026, aged 74. Haaretz reported her death that day, and Ynet reporting followed.

Paz died of cancer. She had survived cancer three times and had recently been diagnosed for a fourth time. Her death was announced by Otef Tachana Merkazit, which said she had dedicated her life to the residents of south Tel Aviv.

Born in Lodz, raised in Holon

Paz was born on June 18, 1952, in Lodz, Poland, to Holocaust survivor parents. She moved to Israel with her parents at the age of four and grew up in Holon.

That early life is the background given in her biography. The public record that made her a national figure in Israel came much later, and it was built in the streets and courts of south Tel Aviv.

The south Tel Aviv campaigns

From around 2012 and 2013, Paz led the South Tel Aviv Liberation Front, a branch of the Otef Tachana Merkazit residents group. Her campaigning position was that the state and the city had abandoned poorer Jewish residents of the area. She organised regular protests and led numerous demonstrations advocating for residents of southern Tel Aviv.

Her protests included demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court presidents Miriam Naor and Esther Hayut. She was a prominent right wing activist and a leader of public campaigns against illegal immigration, and she was arrested multiple times for her activism.

Arrests, cases and a prison sentence

Her confrontational methods brought repeated arrests and criminal cases. The cases included indictments over the vandalism of the European Union delegation office in 2019 and a break in at a preschool for migrant children in 2020.

In November 2024 she began a 45 day prison sentence after a vandalism conviction. That sentence was the most serious legal result of the protest years, and it came late in a long run of arrests and court cases linked to her activism.

How she was seen

Paz divided opinion in Israel, and this article records both sides as they were reported. Critics, including Haaretz, described her rhetoric as racist. Supporters saw her as a voice for neglected residents of south Tel Aviv.

Her own stated position, as a campaigner, was that residents of the poorer southern part of the city had been left to carry the effects of immigration policy on their own streets, while the state and the city looked elsewhere. That was her campaigning argument. It is reported here as her position, not as a finding of fact.

With her death at 74, the group she worked with marked the same ground she had campaigned on for more than a decade. Otef Tachana Merkazit said she had dedicated her life to the residents of south Tel Aviv.