Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music

Rimon's main campus is in the Morasha neighborhood of Ramat Hasharon.[5] The school offers professional study in jazz and a range of contemporary styles, including rock, pop, R&B, and bebop.[1]

In addition to its Ramat Hasharon campus, Rimon was operating an Acre campus within that city's cultural center by December 2024.[6] A 2024 report also described a Rimon Youth Center operating at the Culture Hall in Petah Tikvah.[1]

Rimon was founded in 1985. It was initially called the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music and adopted the name Rimon School of Music in 2013.[2][4] A 2017 Ynet profile says the registered association was established by Guri Agmon, Gil Dor, Harry Lipshitz, Ilan Mochiach, Orly Sela, and Yehuda Eder.[5] Eder was identified as the school's initiator and first director; a 2025 account says he directed Rimon for its first four years and that Amikam Kimelman later served as director from 1990 to 2014.[5][4]

From its early years, the school emphasized learning music through creation: writing songs, improvising, and connecting instrumental study with composition, production, and theory.[4] It later broadened its stylistic scope beyond jazz, including Mediterranean and Middle Eastern music alongside other contemporary genres.[5]

A 2025 Maariv anniversary report placed annual enrollment at about 600 students and said more than 5,000 Rimon graduates were working in Israel's music and entertainment industries.[4] The figures measure different populations: yearly enrollment and the school's cumulative graduate presence in the industry.

Rimon is not funded by Israel's Council for Higher Education. A 2017 profile said most of its budget came from tuition, fundraising, donations, and other resources, while the Ministry of Culture supplied about 5% of its budget.[5]

Rimon's alumni and associated artists span several generations of Israeli popular and jazz music. Singer Achinoam Nini, an Israeli of Yemenite descent, enrolled after completing her military service and met guitarist Gil Dor, who was on the teaching staff.[3][7] They began performing together, and their first concert, at Tel Aviv's Jazz, Blues & Videotape Festival, was enthusiastically received.[7]

Maariv has identified artists including Aviv Geffen, Eran Tzur, Miri Mesika, Keren Peles, Netta Barzilai, Nuno, Yasmin Moallem, and Ohad Hitman among Rimon's graduates or artists associated with the school.[4] Geffen formed the band HaTavuyot at Rimon, while Jane Bordeaux was founded on the school's lawn.[4] Singer and actress Mira Awad, an Arab Christian from the Galilee, studied at Rimon before moving to Tel Aviv.[8] Ethiopian-Israeli singer-songwriter Aveva Dese is also identified as an alumna whose musicianship and songwriting reflected her training there.[9]

The school has also participated in public cultural programming. Rimon partnered with the U.S. Embassy and the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality to produce the two-day "Sing Hallelujah!" First American Gospel Festival, featuring the Reginald Golden Singers and Israeli professional and youth gospel choirs. The associated week of programming drew more than 2,000 attendees.[10]

The Morasha campus in Ramat Hasharon is Rimon's principal site.[5] By December 2024, its Acre campus, housed in the city's cultural center, was completing its third year of operation and preparing to graduate its first cohort.[6]

During air-raid alerts, classes at the Acre campus continued in shelters. Acre's municipality also offered scholarships to students who attended the campus and resided in the city.[6]

Rimon's curriculum includes performance, songwriting, composition, arranging, conducting, jazz, vocal and instrumental study, and music production. A 2021 overview also described programs in music for film, television, and computer games; musical theater; and innovation, entrepreneurship, technology, and programming.[11] As of a 2017 profile, faculty included Yoni Rechter, Yehudit Ravitz, Yaron Gottfried, Ohad Hitman, and Eran Tzur, with Iris Portugali serving as academic director.[5]

In 2017, Rimon announced a four-year program with the Open University of Israel leading to a BA in Arts and a Rimon graduate certificate in music professions.[12] Admission was based on aptitude tests and an interview, without requiring a matriculation certificate or psychometric examination. Students could combine performance studies with subjects such as literature, cinema, art history, theater, film and media composition, arranging, conducting, entrepreneurship, music-app programming, and sound.[12]

As described in 2021, Rimon's innovation program introduced entrepreneurship and basic programming in the first year and moved into a start-up lab and advanced programming in the second. Its planned third year focused on developing personal projects.[13] The program also included meetings with industry leaders, company visits, and talks by working musicians. Student Roy Belkin, who entered without programming experience, co-founded Artery, an app intended to connect musicians and venues more easily and cheaply; he described its goal as becoming the "Airbnb of music concerts."[13]

Rimon is a founding member of Berklee Global Partners. As of 2022, Rimon and Berklee College of Music in Boston had maintained academic and musical ties for two decades.[2] A 2013 report said that a matriculation agreement established in 1992 allowed Israeli students to begin their studies at Rimon and continue at Berklee.[14] The broader partnership reduced the cost of obtaining a Berklee education by allowing students to complete part of their studies outside the United States.[2]

In 2022, Rimon was sending roughly 15 students to Berklee each year, with about 50 Rimon students studying there at any given time.[2] A 2015 account described a route under which students completed their first two years at Rimon and their final two at Berklee, earning the same degree as students who completed all four years in the United States. Berklee president Roger Brown said the arrangement significantly reduced the cost of the degree.[15]

The Rimon-Berklee relationship was reported to have become a model for Berklee's wider International Network Partners program. Berklee also established a scholarship fund for Israeli students, launched with a personal gift from Brown and his wife, Linda Mason.[14]