Zelda was born on 20 June 1914 in Chernigov (Chernihiv), Ukraine, into a distinguished Hasidic-Chabad family descended from the Schneersohn (Lubavitch) dynasty.
Zelda Schneersohn was born on June 20, 1914, in the city of Chernigov (Chernihiv), then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. She was born into a distinguished rabbinic family with deep ties to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty; her father, Shlomo Shlomo Schneersohn, was a relative of the Lubavitcher Rebbes, and her mother, Rachel, came from a similarly learned lineage.
This birth into a family steeped in Jewish mysticism, religious learning, and Hasidic tradition would profoundly shape Zelda's later poetic voice, which fused deep spiritual yearning with an intimate, often mystical relationship to nature, memory, and the divine. Her early childhood in Ukraine, amid the upheavals of World War I and the Russian Revolution, exposed her to instability and displacement from a very young age.
In 1925, when Zelda was eleven, her family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, eventually settling in Jerusalem's Old City and later in the religious neighborhoods surrounding it. This move placed her within a milieu that combined intense religiosity with the emerging cultural ferment of the Zionist project, exposing her simultaneously to the ancient traditions of her ancestors and the modernizing currents of Hebrew literature and the arts. Her birth and lineage are considered foundational to understanding the singular, deeply spiritual quality of her later poetry, unmatched among her secular contemporaries in Israeli letters.