Ofer Yannay

Origins and early life

Ofer Yannay was born in 1975 and grew up in Yavne, the second of eight children of Mordechai, born in Tunisia, and Toni, from a family of Libyan immigrants, who had both come to Israel in the 1950s. His father was principal of the religious high school in Yavne and his mother a preschool teacher, and he studied at the yeshiva high school in Nehalim, then at Yeshivat Har Etzion in its Hesder programme, serving in the army's tank corps.

Work and career

He enters this directory through that religious Jewish schooling, and he credits it himself: Talmud study, with its complex and often ambiguous texts, helped him, he says, hone his business acumen. After the army he joined the Amirim honours programme at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taking a degree in physics, mathematics and computer science, and when his first venture, the food-delivery service Go4Eat started in 2001, failed, he took an MBA at Ben-Gurion University.

Drawn to solar energy while studying, he founded Nofar Energy, named after the water lily, and in 2012 found his opening by selling rooftop systems to the kibbutz movement, with more than 1,000 installed by 2015. In December 2020 Nofar listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in what was then the second-largest initial public offering in Israel's history, and grew into a group with projects in Israel, Europe, the United States and Brazil.

He told that story in a book, New Under the Sun, first published in Hebrew in 2022, and in 2023 he bought the Hapoel Tel Aviv basketball club, becoming its first private owner. Under his ownership the club won the EuroCup in 2025, its first European title, and entered the EuroLeague for the 2025-2026 season, while he also chairs the Yannay Foundation, which supports education, health care and foster families. The Jerusalem Post named him among its fifty most influential Jews in 2023, at number 40, and again in 2026, at number 29.