Professor Mordechai Omer passes away

A great loss for the art world in Israel, director general and chief curator of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Professor Mordechai Omer, passed away on Thursday night at Ichilov Hospital after a long battle with cancer. Omer, 70 years old, managed the museum in addition to his work as a professor of musicology and art history and director of the Tel Aviv University Gallery.

Omer, born in Haifa in 1941, earned a bachelor's degree in art history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and continued on to his master's degree at Columbia University, and then a doctorate from the University of East Anglia. At the end of the 1960s, he worked at the Modern Art Museum (MOMA) in New York and later returned to Israel to teach at Bezalel and Tel Aviv University. At the outset of the 1980s he became the head of the Art History Department. In 1995 he was appointed as the head of the Tel Aviv Museum and served, in addition to his roles at the university, as head curator and director general.

Omer was known as an authoritative curator and director with extraordinary capabilities, a fact that allowed him to produce and promote major innovations and special projects in addition to extensive annual activity.

Omer, not survived by any family, was laid to rest on Friday at a Jerusalem cemetery.