Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Israeli Art Collector Ami Brown Dies at 81

Crossposted from Haaretz

Ami Brown, one of the foremost art collectors in Israel, passed away at his home in Thursday night after a long battle with cancer. He leaves his wife Gaby and their daughter, and was interred yesterday at Kibbutz Shefayim.

Image by Yuval Tebol

Brown was born in Tel Aviv in 1929, the middle of three siblings. The youngest sibling, painter and sculptor Ika Brown, was killed in a traffic accident 45 years ago.

Brown was a man of culture and of letters, a devout Zionist who had to his credit a glorious and varied career that he pursued quietly and with modesty. For the past 40 years Brown collected art; his first purchases were made in installments, before he became wealthy. He eventually became one of the most important collectors of Israeli art, with a collection numbering more than 3,000 works. In his collection were many artists regarded as pillars of Israeli art, among them Joseph Zaritsky, Aviva Uri, Arie Aroch, Moshe Kupferman, Yechiel Krize, Yair Garbuz and Moshe Gershuni.

Read more at Haaretz.com

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.