Ranan Hartman

Origins and early life

Ranan Hartman was born in Montreal in 1969, the youngest child of Barbara Hartman and of Rabbi David Hartman, the philosopher of Judaism who founded the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and the family settled in Jerusalem in 1971.

Work and career

His father taught him, he has said, that one can change the world and that there is no value in complaining about the problems of the Jewish people when one can step up and try to fix what is wrong. He served as an officer in the Armored Corps and graduated in law from Bar-Ilan University in 1995, after watching many Israeli students turned away at home go abroad, especially to England, to study law. That same year, aged twenty-six, he founded Ono Academic College, which began in a single trailer with a hundred students of law and business and was first affiliated with the University of Manchester before full accreditation by Israel's Council for Higher Education.

In 2001 Ono opened Israel's first separate campus for ultra-Orthodox students, so that men and women of that community could study without giving up their way of life, and by 2022 almost half of the ultra-Orthodox students in the country were studying there. Every year the college also enrols hundreds of students of Ethiopian origin on scholarships, a path the Jerusalem Post linked to the rise of Pnina Tamano-Shata, the first Ethiopian-Israeli minister, and it trains Arab Israelis and residents of east Jerusalem for leadership roles.

Under his direction Ono has become Israel's largest independent college, with some 20,000 students on campuses in Kiryat Ono, Haifa and Jerusalem, about half of them the first in their families to study at that level. Its programmes range from bringing young people with autism into intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces to rehabilitation for trauma victims, and in 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him among its fifty most influential Jews.