Ofra Haza, who has died suddenly aged 42, was Israel's most successful international pop star. While her driving Middle East-flavoured dance tracks were known in techno clubs from New York to Tokyo, her ethereal ballads also mesmerised world music enthusiasts. But her lasting legacy was her cultural impact in Israel. Almost single-handedly, she popularised the culture of the country's Oriental Jews, the Mizrachim. By doing so, she raised their status as the custodians of exquisite traditions which had long been neglected by the artistic establishment.
Ofra's origins were humble. One of eight children born to Yemeni-Jewish parents who had moved to Israel to escape persecution, she grew up in a Tel Aviv slum. She loved singing traditional Yemenite Jewish folk tunes with her mother and at 12 joined a local theatre group where her talent was recognised and she was recruited as a singer/actress. After two years' army service she returned to the troupe, and then launched her solo career at 19.
Her 1979 hit, The Tart's Song, was notable for its slangy lyrics and in 1983 she came second in the Eurovision Song Contest with an equally vivacious number called Stay Alive.
More audacious in a wider sense was her 1985 album, Yemenite Songs. Earlier Israeli rock artists had updated folk songs from the country's pioneer generation or borrowed from the western idiom. But Ofra showed that one could return to a far older diaspora tradition by turning a devotional poem from the 17th century Yemenite rabbi Shalom Shabazi into a nightclub sensation in the mid-1980s. The album became an instant success in Israel.
She cleverly re-released Yemenite Songs as Fifty Gates of Wisdom, and followed it with Shaday (a mystical name for God). By then her international success was assured, and her survival in a plane crash intensified her adulation.
For all her loyalty to tradition, she never shied away from experimentation. Her innovation was to pluck the old melodies out of the folk-club ghetto. Her music acquired a harder rock sound with Desert Wind in 1990, and two years later she recorded a single with the avant-garde Sisters of Mercy.
That same year she sang with the Pakistani ghazal virtuoso, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on Sony's Millennium tribute Prayer Cycle, while Iggy Pop intoned the chorus to Ofra's feminist ballad Daw da Hiya. This appeared on her 1992 Grammy-nominated CD Kirya, which one rock magazine hailed as "the beginning of the next era in the world fusion of music."
By now Ofra was singing in both Hebrew and English, and addressing issues other than forbidden love. The Trains of No Return warns against accepting another Holocaust, while other numbers attacked slavery and the plight of refugees. Never overtly political, Ofra Haza was none the less devoted to peace. In 1991 she appeared on the international Give Peace a Chance line-up and in 1994 Yitzhak Rabin, winner of the Nobel peace prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, requested that she should sing at the award ceremony.
More than just an ambassador for Israel's Yemenite community, Ofra presented an authentically Levantine face of Israel to the wider world. Despite her glamour, she was never a prima donna; she co-operated generously with musicians the world over and was a private, almost shy, person. The memory of her vocal clarity and unaffected piety will endure.
She is survived by her husband, Doron Ashkenazi, whom she married in 1998.