Agmon, who had won the Israeli Theater Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2007, was married to famed Israeli actress Gila Almagor.
Agmon was born in Poland and moved to Israel aged four. At 33, he left for the US, where he studied and served as a consultant to the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.
His big entrance into the world of theater and the arts was in 1964 when he founded the Bimot Theater, which put on a variety of famed Israeli theatrical works such as The Megillah, He Was A Hassidic Man, and the renowned Bustan Sephardi.
His illustrious career reached a peak when he brought He Was A Hassidic Man to the Broadway stage.
He then founded the Beit Lessin Theater in 1978 and directed it for eight years.
In the early ‘90s, he founded a private production company by the name of “Bimot 2000” through which he produced Theatronetto, a theater festival which performs monodramas during Passover in Tel Aviv to create dialogue between the actor and the audience. Agmon produced the Theatronetto every year for the following 17 years.
He taught in Tel Aviv University’s theater department throughout the early- to mid-90s, but in 1995 – following a serious financial blow to the national theater, Habima – he was appointed its director and artistic manager for ten years but failed to restore Habima to financial health.
In 2010, he was appointed director of the Arab-Hebrew Theater in Old Jaffa.
For most of his life he was best known for his five decade-long program on Army Radio called “Personal Questions” in which he would conduct a one-on-one interview with an interviewee in each program. He hosted over 1,300 guests from different fields of life over 53 years.
He married Gila Almagor in 1963.
“Yanka’leh Agmon is gone,” President Reuven Rivlin wrote sorrowfully on his personal Twitter page. “The legendary theater manager, the man who did not agree to get bored and the magnificent interviewer of 'Personal Questions.'
“He created and curated for us an Israeli historical-cultural mosaic that will remain with us for generations to come,” Rivlin continued. “Gila and the family, all of our love to you.”
Habima National Theater expressed its sadness over the passing of Agmon, stating that it “mourns his death.”
The funeral will take place Thursday at 12 p.m. at Kibbutz Shfayim. Mourners are asked to wear masks and follow coronavirus restrictions.