Sivan Klein

Klein is from Jerusalem and studied biology in high school.[1][2] On April 1, 2003, at age 18½, she was crowned Miss Israel, chosen unanimously by the judges from the final six contestants.[1] At the coronation ceremony she declared her ambition to become a psychiatrist, "or at least a criminologist."[1]

Following her pageant win, Klein pursued higher education alongside her entertainment career. She completed a law degree at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and undertook a law-firm internship.[3] She also completed business-administration studies.[4] In a 2013 interview, she said she was preparing for the Israeli bar examinations.[5] She also took an acting course with Yoram Loewenstein.[4][3] Klein later reflected that her studies gave her confidence, though she did not feel they had directly advanced her broadcasting work.[5]

After winning Miss Israel, Klein developed a career as a model and television presenter, later hosting programs on Channel 12.[2][3] In a 2021 profile she recalled conducting on-camera interviews with Hollywood actors including Johnny Depp, Anthony Hopkins, and Robin Wright Penn.[2] She described her years in entertainment as "not a waste of time at all," while also acknowledging that people sometimes assumed she lacked intelligence because of her public image.[2]

Klein also worked behind the camera as a documentary filmmaker. She directed and presented "היום היקר בחיי" ("The Most Expensive Day of My Life") for Channel 10, a 45-minute documentary examining extravagant Israeli weddings, covering topics from costs and social expectations to regional differences between Israel's center and periphery.[6] In 2017, she created "עד החתונה זה יתבטל" ("Until the Wedding, It Will Be Cancelled"), a personal documentary connected to the cancellation of her planned wedding to Gilad Keinan around 2014.[7]

Klein married advertising executive Ziv Koren in 2015.[7] Their eldest son was born prematurely at 34 weeks in August 2016 and spent a month in neonatal intensive care.[7][3] Klein has described that period as formative: the nurse who cared for her son had herself retrained from law into nursing, a coincidence that planted, as Klein later put it, the idea of a nursing career — though she said she only understood its impact in retrospect.[3]

By 2021, Klein and Koren had a second child, a daughter named Aili.[3][8] Before her third pregnancy Klein experienced a miscarriage and had opened a fertility-treatment file, but discovered she was pregnant naturally before beginning treatment — despite having been told by doctors at ages 38–39 that she was too old to conceive again.[8] A youngest son, named Libi, subsequently completed the family.[8]

Klein's long-standing interest in hospitals, anatomy, and medicine — reinforced by her son's premature birth — eventually led her to formal retraining.[3] By 2021, then 37 and a mother of two, she was enrolled in an academic nursing program at Ichilov Hospital while continuing her television work, with clinical training in cardiothoracic surgery.[3] She said her goal was to combine nursing with broadcasting rather than leave either field behind, and named midwifery as a longer-term aspiration.[3]

In June 2023, Klein announced she had completed two and a half years of nursing studies and passed the government licensing examination.[9] She wrote: "When Beno was born, the dream of becoming a nurse was born too … No crown. No cameras. From today, also a nurse."[9] She subsequently worked as a nurse in the women's emergency department at Ichilov Hospital.[8] As of a 2026 interview, she was on extended maternity leave following the birth of her third child and said she still needed further study before qualifying as a midwife.[8]

When the Miss Israel pageant was canceled in 2022 after more than seventy years, Klein publicly backed the decision in a video posted to Channel 12's website.[10] She described the competition as outdated and criticized the format of combining substantive questions with bikini appearances, saying it was "shallow."[10] While acknowledging that some past winners were accomplished and that organizers had genuinely sought to empower women, she argued the structure undermined that goal: "It places a crown on the head and at the same time, a ceiling."[10] Marking the pageant's end alongside the death of Queen Elizabeth II, she remarked: "Queen Elizabeth has died, and now the beauty queen contest is buried. Definitely not a time to be a queen, but maybe it's a slightly better time to be a woman."[10]

Sources differ slightly on Klein's age at the time of her 2003 Miss Israel win. A contemporaneous Ynet report described her as 18½ at her coronation on April 1, 2003.[1] A later Xnet/Ynet article gives her age as 19 and notes that she went on to represent Israel at the Miss World competition.[4] The contemporaneous report provides the more precise age and date.