Jewelry has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

One of my earliest memories is making a crown from daisies I picked in a field near my home, tying them together with yarn. I grew up watching my mother and grandmother work with their hands: crocheting, sewing, weaving, and creating beautiful things from simple materials.

Those skills carried a much deeper meaning in my family. During the Holocaust, my grandmother's ability to sew, mend, and crochet helped her family survive, allowing them to exchange their work for food and necessities. What was passed down to me as a childhood craft was, in fact, a legacy of resilience, creativity, and making something beautiful with your own hands.

When I was seven or eight, my mother taught me to work with wire, pliers, and cutters. Years later, I discovered that I could combine the intricate techniques I had learned from my family with metal to create jewelry. That became the foundation of my work.

My path to becoming a jewelry designer was not a straight one. I studied statistics and worked in actuarial science in corporate America, but eventually I realized that I wanted to spend my life creating rather than calculating. I left that world and chose the path of an artist.

My jewelry has since taken me from the runways of New York Fashion Week to magazines, celebrities, and Jewish museums around the world. Travel has also become an important source of inspiration, introducing me to new colors, textiles, architecture, traditions, and ways of seeing beauty.

After many years in the United States, I returned home to Israel in 2010. Coming home brought my Jewish heritage and spirituality to the center of my work and inspired my Judaica collection. I am a secular Jew, but my faith and the study of the Bible give me tremendous strength and inspiration.

Today, I create my jewelry in my home studio in Haifa, overlooking the Carmel Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea.

I believe jewelry can be more than something beautiful to wear. It can carry a memory, a blessing, a belief, a connection to your heritage, or simply a reminder of something important to you.

My hope is that each piece becomes one of those little vessels of meaning that travel with you through life, something that feels beautiful to wear, and becomes meaningful because of the story it carries with you.

Keren Peled
Founder & Designer, KELKA
Designed and made in Haifa, Israel