SAN DIEGO — It is customary for winners of the annual Genesis Prize, often referred to as the “Jewish Nobel,” to donate the $1 million award to causes they are passionate about. Past recipients have given their funds to combating antisemitism, assisting refugees, women’s rights and preserving the memory of Greek Holocaust victims.

When Israeli actress Gal Gadot was announced as the 2026 Genesis Prize Laureate in November, she promised to “dedicate this award to the organizations who will help Israel heal,” and yesterday, the Jewish Funders Network announced that she will be able to double her impact.

Capping off Monday’s JFN International Conference morning plenary, Andrés Spokoiny, president and CEO of JFN, told the attendees that the Genesis Prize Foundation had partnered with JFN “to turn that gift into a catalyst for greater action” through a gift-matching program. By getting JFN members to invest an additional $1 million, Gadot’s initiative will invest “in the therapists, educators, social workers and community leaders helping Israeli society heal” in the wake of both the Oct. 7 terror attacks and the following two-plus years of war, including the current conflict with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.

It’s one of many topics, some fraught with emotion, that attendees were discussing on the second day of the California gathering, which was attended by over 600 funders and representatives from philanthropic foundations.

The opening plenary also featured Sigal Yaniv Feller, executive director of the Jewish Funders Network Israel, who trekked 31 hours from Israel — on three flights — to make it to the conference, discussing the results of a recent Edmond de Rothschild Foundation study of “the Young Pioneers” of Israel.

The study showed that the group, which she called “the TikTok generation,” was both severely affected by the war in Gaza and also nevertheless determined to rebuild their country.

The survey found that 38% of young adults who were studied, ages 22-35, personally knew someone who had been killed or was injured in the war. Over 70% struggled with increased anxiety and a decrease in their ability to concentrate and feel secure due to the war. Nearly three-quarters of participants, 71%, reported a decline in their trust in the state’s ability to provide security, and 42% believed that they can influence national policy.

Still, “while they feel abandoned by the state, they believe in themselves,” Yaniv Feller said. “Maybe most importantly, 84% still see their personal and professional future being built within Israel” — a potential positive sign for a country increasingly concerned about emigration and a so-called “brain drain.”

The plenary then showcased three young leaders via Zoom who were spurred to action after the Oct. 7 attacks: Miriam Amedi, CEO of Forum for Reservists’ Wives; Maor Tsabari, a poet and the head of mental health rehabilitation at Brothers for Life; and Yonatan Shamriz, a social activist and founder of the “Kumu” (Awaken) movement that aims to develop leaders bottom-up. (The three were supposed to attend the conference in person but were unable to make the trip.)

For Amedi, she didn’t have a choice but to leap to help. Her husband — actor and musician Idan Amedi — jumped into action after the massacres, immediately volunteering for the reserves, but after 93 days of action, he was severely injured, and she found herself thrown into a new world. After her husband was discharged from the hospital, he held a press conference, thanking Israelis for praying for him, and she received a flood of messages from other wives whose husbands were injured in the war.

“That was the moment,” she said. “That was my pivot, understanding that I have no more privilege to be a private person, that I need to use my personal story to raise the voice of the reservist families and wives.”

For Tsabari, “Oct. 7 didn’t change my life path,” he said. “I would say it was not a turning point. It was a moment of clarity,” he said. “Survival alone is not enough. A nation survives trauma only when it rebuilds life, morally, socially, spiritually.”

Meanwhile, Shamriz, whose immediate and extended family lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza for over 30 years prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, was awoken by his wife at 6:30 a.m. on the day of the massacres. Three-and-a-half hours later, he received a message from his brother, Alon, saying that terrorists had infiltrated his house. “I immediately understand that this is going to be the last time I’ll speak with my brother,” he recalled at the conference.

Locked in a safe room with his wife and 2-year-old, Shamriz stifled his emotions so as to not scare his daughter as he sent his brother a message, saying he loved him. Alon was taken captive into Gaza. Two months later, Alon was shot by the IDF, who mistook him for Hamas gunmen. Three weeks later, Shamriz’s son was born, and as he looked at his kids, “I asked myself, ‘What is my mission now? How can I build Israel? What is my role to build to fix Israel for them, build them a country that they will not need to suffer even 1% of what I suffered?’”

All of the young leaders said they were spurred to action. “We need to create the future we want to see right now,” Amedi said. “There is no more time to wait.” What began with a handful of women reaching out to her is now 20,000 women representing 100,000 families, advocating for their families’ rights.

Young Israeli leaders, like those on the panel, “have the chance to rebuild Israel,” Tsabari said. “In a sense, I would say that we are the new founders seeing through the eyes of the first generation.”

It wasn’t the government that supported Shamriz’s family after his neighbors were murdered and his community was destroyed; it was other Israelis who provided shelter and protected him. “It’s our time to take control of our generation, take civic responsibility, and we need good people to enter public service and more people willing to stand up and be part of change,” he said.

Last year on Oct. 7, Shamriz participated in an unofficial memorial ceremony, mainly organized by victims’ families, which was broadcast on over 250 channels around the world, with representatives of Israel together on one stage: Haredim and secular Jews and Arab Israelis. Men and women. Together. It was an image of what could be, he said.

The morning plenary ended with Spokoiny’s annual address, where he called on the Jewish community to make brave moves, and he gave the audience a list of five action items to focus on: reforming Israel, making affordable Jewish day schools, politicizing philanthropy, uniting antisemitism initiatives and finding meaning through adult learning.

“If we only rebuild, we will have failed,” he said, in reference to Israel, pointing to the young leaders who spoke prior to him as examples of people willing to shake things up. Now was a time when Israelis needed to unite and imagine a new reality. “Have you ever dreamed of having Israel fighting alongside six Arab nations against a common enemy?” he asked.

The expense of Jewish day schools, Spokoiny said, “for me, is the biggest disgrace of American Jewish life — that in the richest and most prosperous Jewish community in the history of the Jewish people, Jewish day schools remain unaffordable. But now we have tax credits. We have a new interest by funders, and most important, we have a new interest by parents to send their children to Jewish schools.”

Additionally, philanthropists no longer have the luxury to skirt politics, he argued. “We are now in a moment of enormous political upheaval, old norms are being abandoned, and our political system in Israel, in the U.S. and around the world, seems to be moving in very dark directions. We can lament or we can get engaged.”

Spokoiny said he didn’t “want to rehash here the whole tired debate” of whether or not funders should invest in combating antisemitism, and instead focused on efficiency. “Could we achieve the same results with 20% less spending?” he asked. “ If the answer is yes, it means that $150 million could be redeployed for other urgent needs.”

Today, “millions of Jews are asking existential questions,” Spokoiny said. “Many were searching for meaning before Oct. 7, but after Oct. 7, that search has intensified dramatically,” which is where the investment in adult education came in, ending his list of firm goals to focus on.

“Last year, Andrés really challenged the funder community to take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we were funding as if the future was depending on it, and I think he did it in a way that was really effective,” Emily Kane Miller, founder and CEO of Ethos Giving, told eJP. 

Over the past year, she said, funders have looked at what they were investing in and questioned if initiatives were repetitive. They are learning what wasn’t working and working together to find solutions. “There are no sacred cows,” Kane Miller said. As was the trend over the past several years, the funders she works with want to invest in initiatives connected to Jewish Peoplehood, identity and joy.   

“What we are seeing here are funders asking hard questions,” she said, especially related to the breakdown of denominations. After the morning plenary, she attended the “Revamping the Rabbinate: Data, Strategy and Action” session, which discussed the recent ATRA study.

If someone spoke to Abraham Geiger, who is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism, and told him that the denominations were evolving, he would be excited by the prospect, Kane Miller said. “It’s an amazing moment to be living in.”

After leaving the session, Kane Miller began brainstorming ideas to support young people entering the rabbinate and is contemplating funding a rabbinic internship program for high schoolers who show interest in entering the clergy. She wants to see a world where Jewish parents are as excited about their kids becoming rabbis as they are about their kids becoming doctors and lawyers.

Additional sessions throughout the day discussed the crisis of democracy in America, Arab citizens as essential partners, funding initiatives in the West Bank and Gaza strip and ways to combat antisemitism in gaming.

“Philanthropy — Jewish or not —  is not in the gaming sphere or AI,” Michal Nodel, senior advisor at Shine A Light Gaming, told eJP. “If we had seen this in 2003 with Facebook and gotten a head start on moderation and enforcement and identifying toxic behavior back then, we would be looking at a very different social media landscape today.”

Dinner on the second day offered many options for attendees, including a live taping of Jonah Platt’s podcast “Being Jewish” and a farm-to-table meal celebrating the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Jewish Climate Trust, which unveiled its “Jewish Guide to Climate Philanthropy” at the dinner.

Attendees throughout the day broached many formerly taboo topics, including not only the possible breakdown of liberal denominations, but also the argument that there is a need to widen the communal tent to include people who do not identify as Zionists or who openly oppose the concept. 

There was growing urgency to better understand anti-Zionists, with interest in funding new studies to explore the topic further, expanding on the recent Jewish Federations of North America study and a similar qualitative survey by For The Sake of Argument. 

No longer could anti-Zionists simply be written off as antisemites, numerous attendees told eJP, because, while some are, there are plenty of people who identify as anti-Zionist who aren’t — something they said the community was unwilling to face in previous years. Some even admitted that their own children had markedly different views of Zionism, and not including those Jews in the communal conversation is damaging, they said. 

At the same time, one funder told eJP, philanthropists need to set lines for what they value and not budge on them. For that funder, opening the door for people who identify as anti-Zionists, even if they were Jewish, was off the table.

Another topic many attendees spoke about was the investment being put into anti-Israel propaganda, often using AI, and the need to combat it. Spokoiny told eJP that, over the next year, the philanthropic world would probably see “a decrease of activism in campus and social media. It’s not going to disappear. It’s not going to decrease dramatically, but I think the market is saturated there, and I think that the opportunities lie elsewhere.”