Good Friday morning!

Israel’s passage of a budget for the first time in more than three years this week will unfreeze many social programs that had been approved but not funded, Michael Bloch, co-founder of Israel Impact Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm, told eJewishPhilanthropy. The budget was delayed by government infighting and four rounds of elections in two years.

NGO leaders and staff had struggled to survive during the years between budgets, said Maya Natan, CEO of Keshet, Israel’s first donor-advised fund. Some closed, and many adapted; others were saved by donors. “I don’t think it’s a huge sigh of relief, but at least they can plan ahead,” Natan said.

If the government had failed to pass the budget, it would have had to call early elections again, Bloch pointed out. “The previous instability made it very hard for NGOs,” he said, as the new governments tended to restart each ministry’s budget negotiations.

UJA-Federation of New York commended the new spending plan, praising the state for investing in social mobility for Arab and ultra-Orthodox populations. “UJA-Federation of New York is also now hopeful that, together with our partners, we will be able to proceed with several initiatives that have been frozen due to a lack of budget,” said CEO Eric S. Goldstein. Eric Fingerhut, CEO of The Jewish Federations of North America, said his organization was “particularly pleased” to see the largest-ever allocation to the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.

TURNAROUND MODE

YIVO is professionalizing, growing and reviving a lost world

Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

One digitized page at a time, until four million pages of books and other documents are clickable online, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York is capturing for a new generation what life was like in the Jewish intellectual center of Vilna, Lithuania, before the Holocaust, YIVO CEO Jonathan Brent told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff. The effort, called the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, is salvaging Jewish memory at a time when those who remember that long-ago world fade away. “We’re talking about a lost civilization here,” said Glenn Dynner, a professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College who has drawn on YIVO’s archives in his scholarship.

A new calm: YIVO, which is now in an unexpected phase of growth and increased revenue, is in the final stages of finishing the digitization project. And it is becoming a more professional operation, Brent said. “We have had a rocky financial history. There was instability on the board of directors and churn among the staff,” said Brent, who came to YIVO in 2009 from Yale University Press in New Haven, Conn., where he served as editorial director. “We had a reputation of not being able to complete a project on time, or on budget.” All of that is changing. 

Recurring dream: When YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was created in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1925, its founders had planned to offer advanced degrees in Yiddish studies. World War II forced them to relocate the institute in New York, where it frequently struggled to secure adequate funding, even into the early 2000s. Now, the dream of offering a master’s degree has been revived, thanks to a period of growth in support and an expanding public reach, Brent said. When it was founded, YIVO was embedded in the world of East European Jewry that was destroyed by World War II. Today, it still serves as a center for culture and scholarship, but also as a repository of books, documents and other artifacts.

Meeting deadlines: Brent said he is hoping to start improving YIVO’s professional image with its execution of the Vilna digitization project. “The Vilna project is a way to keep alive for future generations the Ashkenazi Jewish history, culture and way of life before the Holocaust —  the one my parents knew and brought with them from Eastern Europe, but which has been fading with each new generation,” Blank said. YIVO will complete the Vilna project in January — on time and without going over its $7 million budget, a first for a project of this size, Brent said.

Read the full article here.

REJOINING

Beyond disruption: Learning, leading and healing in 2021

iStock

“I used to encourage our education students to be disruptors. The Jewish educational system was stuck in hard-wired routines, with an outdated compass, serving a population that craved something different, better, more attuned to their needs,” writes Miriam Heller Stern of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

New Goal: “But now life itself is disrupted. Indefinitely. Things we used to take for granted as linear and whole are now fragmented, shuffled, unsettled… The goal is no longer to make a name as a disruptor, defined as a cool, edgy innovator. The goal is to learn how to lead and teach the disrupted with empathy, strategy and flexibility.”

Rejoining: “How do we practice the dispositions to lead as Jewish educators in today’s disrupted world?… Kintsugi, the Japanese art of ‘golden rejoining,’ is a practice of reassembling the pieces of a broken precious vessel and painting over the cracks with gold. In our ‘Kintsugi Beit Midrash,’ I lead students in exploring classical Jewish texts about the power of remaking ourselves and honoring our broken pieces. We can both validate our human fallibility and empower ourselves to improve at the same time.”

Read the full piece here.

SAVING A LIFE

Jewish investors score a win in the fight against COVID

iStock

“Last week, pharmaceutical giant Merck made a historic announcement: it would widely share its COVID-19 therapy drug patents royalty-free to enable mass production for the poorest countries in the world. Jewish investors helped them get there,” write Dani Nurick and Rabbi Jacob Siegel at Jlens Network, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Prep work: “A month ago, JLens staff met with six of Merck’s senior corporate social responsibility staff and executives to advocate directly with the company to share its technology and increase its transparency around drug pricing… JLens has been in dialogue with Merck for years, including attending the company’s annual meeting in 2017 to dialogue with the CEO.”

Saving a life is a primary value in Judaism: “As investors, we are motivated by Judaism’s historic focus on affordable access to medical care. While the pandemic was devastating London – the bubonic plague, that is, in the late 17th century – Jews in neighboring Italy were still often forced to practice in secret. Rabbi Refael Mordechai Malachi left Italy for Jerusalem and published a book on medical wisdom and Jewish practice. He noted that ‘the community has established, in every single place where Jewish community dwells, to dedicate funds for the sick who are unable to afford the costs of medical care…’ Relatedly, Jewish wisdom explicitly limits monopolistic price-gouging for pharmaceutical drugs. As early as the 12th century, the physician and scholar Nachmanides articulated a prohibition against charging more the fair costs of a pharmaceutical drug, especially when a sick person is desperate, a position echoed throughout the generations since.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Up For Debate: United Nations World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley said he’s optimistic that the outcome of his Twitter exchange with billionaire Elon Musk might mean more help from the wealthy for the world’s poor, but experts are divided about the wisdom of having a policy debate in public and on social media, report Stephanie Beasley and Shabtai Gold in Devex. Food and famine experts are concerned that Beasley might have muddied the waters about famine, hunger and what can solve those problems, but those focused on philanthropy said that pressuring the wealthy to work with organizations on global issues could be helpful in raising awareness. “It does not make a lot of sense to compare the wealth of a few billionaires with the recurrent needs to deal with hunger and/or famine,” said David Laborde, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “That’s 101 economics, let’s try to compare things comparable and not mix up things just for the sake of a headline.” [Devex]

Raw Talent: In Inside Philanthropy, Ade Adeniji interviews Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, about the couple’s new program, “Rise,” a lifetime fellowship for teenagers. Participants begin the program between the ages of 15 and 17 and are provided with scholarships, mentorships and funding opportunities. The program is based on research that shows talented people can be identified at a young age. “I think all the stories are incredibly interesting. There’s a hundred of them, and there’s a whole lot more. I think we’re just looking at the tip of the iceberg right now,” Schmidt said. [InsidePhilanthropy]

Other People’s Children: Naomi Schaefer Riley, the author of No Way to Treat a Child. How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, asks in Tablet why more Jews don’t take in more foster children compared with evangelical and other Christians, whose pastors called on their congregations to help these children and trained them to do so. She believes that the problem might be one of the norms of conformity and politeness in Jewish spaces. “In a world in which parents seem to be engaged in an ever-escalating battle over whose child has achieved the most academic, athletic, or social successes, where is the community that welcomes kids who look and act different, kids who have been abused or neglected and who can’t behave calmly in any kind of social setting, let alone ace their SATs?” Schaefer Riley asks. [Tablet]

Pic of the Day

Keren Hayesod

Israeli President Isaac Herzog attending a mass prayer celebrating the Sigd holiday in Jerusalem yesterday.

Birthdays

Bernard-Henri Lévy at Tel Aviv University, June 2011; Itzik Edri, Creative Commons.