Top 200 Collectors

During his lifetime, Idan Ofer’s father, shipping magnate Sammy Ofer, was often called the richest man in Israel. When he died in 2011, splitting his billionaire-dollar estate—which included a stockpile of Impressionist and modern masterpieces rumored to include pieces by Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso—was simple. Accountants divvied up Sammy’s shipping assets between his sons, Idan and Eyal, who were instructed to pick an envelope out of a hat. The contents of the envelope they selected would decide the specifics of that division. They have since assured reporters that there are no hard feelings about the way it all played out among the Ofer family’s members. “My brother and I were very peaceful about it,” Idan told Bloomberg in 2017. “He’s living happily ever after and so am I.”

Both brothers are now billionaires. As of September 2022, Forbes valued Idan Ofer’s net worth at around $9.9 billion. In 2013, he donated $42 million to the London Business School in the British capital; four years later, in September 2017, the university opened the Sammy Ofer Centre in honor of Idan’s late father. On the business side of things, Idan owns the shipping company Eastern Pacific Shipping, which operates a fleet of over 100 ships, and he also owns 51 percent of Israel Corp., a publicly-traded chemicals, energy and shipping conglomerate. When Israel Corp. spun off its power, transportation, and shipping divisions into a new firm, called Kenon Holdings, he remained a controlling shareholder.

Batia Ofer is an active and prominent philanthropist within the U.K., focusing on cultural and educational causes. A longtime a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, she was appointed to serve as its chair in October 2023, with her term beginning in December 2023. She also sits on the on the International Council for Sotheby’s, and has also lent support to the V&A museum.

Together, the couple established the HKS Sammy Ofer Graduate Fellowship Fund, which provides scholarship programs for Israeli and Palestinian students to the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Batia is a member of the Dean’s Executive Board for HKS.

Batia is also a major patron for at the Make-A-Wish Foundation, having previously served as president of the Israeli chapter and working with the U.K. chapter since 2015. As part of her work with the foundation, she established Art of Wishes, an initiative that taps the international arts community to raise funds for Make-A-Wish. The initiative hosts an annual auction that has raised, since 2017, more than £8.5 million; its 2021 auction included the organization’s first collectible NFT. The 2023 Art of Wishes gala, in October 2023, included donated works by several top artists like Jadé Fadojutimi, Jenny Holzer, Michael Armitage, Stanley Whitney, Edmund de Waal, Grace Weaver, and Cristina Banban.

Together the couple has also established the Idan and Batia Ofer Family Foundation, which supports social issues in the health, education, and cultural spheres in the U.S., U.K., and Israel. As patrons of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, the couple, through their family foundation, funded the construction of the academy’s Arts Wing at its new campus in Jerusalem.

Similarly, in 2023, the couple were among several donors in a major fundraising campaign who helped the National Gallery in London acquire Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai (Omai), ca. 1776, which National Portrait Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan called “by far the most significant acquisition the National Portrait Gallery has ever made.” Her goal with her philanthropy Batia told ARTnews in an email is “not just donating money but bringing global connections together to facilitate meaningful change through art.”

As collectors, Idan and Batia focus on modern and contemporary art and their collection, in addition to works inherited from Sammy Ofer, include Louise Bourgeois, Richard Prince, David Hammons, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Thomas Struth, Mandy El-Sayegh, and Philip Guston. The Guston work they own, Remorse (1969), was acquired in 2022 at a Sotheby’s auction for $7.8 million, as the Canvas reported. The work is one of the original 28 works from Guston’s series of paintings depicting KKK figures that debuted in 1970 at Marlborough Gallery.