Yaacov Yaar

Yaacov Yaar was born in 1929 in Germany

Yaar was born in Germany in 1929 and came to Palestine with his family in 1935. He went to the Ohel Shem School in Ramat Gan and the Gymnasia Herzlia in Tel Aviv.

After high school he served in the Jewish Settlement Police and then in the IDF. He studied architecture at the Technion in Haifa from 1949 to 1953. There he met the architect Ora Gerstenfeld, whom he married in 1954, and they had two sons and a daughter.

He first worked at the Sharon-Idelson office in Tel Aviv and joined teams that planned the artists' quarter in Old Jaffa. In 1960 he opened his own office with his wife. The office planned public and social projects, including neighborhoods for new immigrants, in places such as Afula, Kfar Sava, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

He chaired the Association of Israel Architects from 1981 to 1985 and taught at the Technion and at Tel Aviv University. His wife Ora died in 1999, and he lives in Tel Aviv with his partner Ruth Berman. From 2000 he worked with Aviv Yaar and Talli Yaar-Kost.