A Jewish family from Mexico, the Jusidmans, recently committed 200 million shekels toward what will become the largest rehabilitation hospital in Israel, a roughly $390 million project rising near Tel Aviv to restore the lives and dignity of those who defended the country and paid a heavy price for it.

In 2024, Ruth Gottesman gave $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine so that no student there would ever pay tuition again, the largest gift ever made to an American medical school.

Watchara/Adobe Stock

Both gifts reached institutions bound up, in different ways, with Jewish life and Israel’s future. Both came from donors acting on unmistakably Jewish convictions. We should want to see many more gifts like these. The hard truth is that they remain the exception.

Far more often, when a Jewish philanthropist makes the defining gift of a lifetime, it lands somewhere outside the institutional Jewish world. It may go to a university, medical center, museum, research institute,or civic project of enormous public value. These gifts are often noble, visionary and deeply needed. But they also raise a question Jewish communal leaders have not asked with enough seriousness: Why do so many of the largest gifts from Jewish donors bypass the very institutions carrying Jewish life forward?

Some of this pattern has been documented before. The most comprehensive research on Jewish mega-gifts is not recent, but its findings remain hard to ignore. Gary Tobin’s research on American Jewish mega-donors found that between 1995 and 2000, Jewish donors made 188 gifts of $10 million or more, totaling $5.3 billion. Only $318 million, roughly 6 percent, went to specifically Jewish institutions. A later study of gifts of $1 million or more from 2001 to 2003 found a similar imbalance at the very top: among gifts above $10 million, secular causes received 95 percent of the dollars given by Jewish donors.

The point is not that Jewish philanthropists are indifferent to Jewish life. Many give generously to Jewish institutions, and some give magnificently. The point is that when we look specifically at the largest, institution-changing gifts, the gifts that define a donor’s legacy and reshape a field, Jewish institutions have historically captured only a small share of Jewish philanthropic capacity.

That pattern should occupy more of our attention than it does.

The easy explanations are the ones we should resist, because they are both demoralizing and wrong. One says our causes simply matter less to donors than curing disease or educating physicians. Another says the development officers at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Met are sharper operators than the people raising money for Jewish day schools, synagogues and communal organizations.

In my career, I’ve spent ample time around Jewish fundraising professionals, and I can tell you the talent and the conviction are not in short supply. The case for Jewish education, continuity, care, community and covenant is as compelling as any in the philanthropic landscape. The problem is not the product, and it is not the people.

The problem is the machine.

Secular institutions that attract nine and ten-figure gifts have spent decades engineering a specific kind of fundraising operation. Much of the organized Jewish world is still running a different one, and the two were designed to produce different results.

The Jewish communal model has a genuine and beautiful strength. It grew out of the annual campaign and the ancient ethic of collective responsibility, the sense that we are answerable for one another. It is built for breadth. In 2024, according to the Jewish Federations of North America, 141 Federations raised and distributed $3 billion, including $1.1 billion through the Annual Campaign, with more than 364,000 donors participating. That is an extraordinary communal achievement. It proves that the system can mobilize many people, many gifts and many relationships, especially in moments of crisis, as the surge of giving after October 7 proved again.

But a system designed to renew a wide base of annual commitments is not the same system that calls forth a single monumental gift.

When that participation logic gets pointed at a major donor, it often shows up as the very thing that suppresses large gifts: the development officer arrives, leading with need, pitches the full catalog of programs and asks the donor to help close this year’s gap. The donor feels chased rather than chosen, and the relationship quietly caps itself.

In my own work with Jewish institutions, I have seen this distinction repeatedly. Many organizations have strong relationships with serious donors, but those relationships are often organized around the annual budget, the scholarship gap, the campaign goal or the urgent program need. When we ask, “What is the lifetime-sized opportunity here? What is the one problem a donor could solve forever? What would a $25 million, $50 million or $100 million gift actually make possible?” The answer is often not yet built.

The donor is known. The need is real. The cause is worthy. But the architecture for a transformational gift is missing.

Watch how the institutions that land the billion-dollar gifts actually work, and you see almost the reverse sequence.

They begin by naming a small number of enduring priorities, not a program list but a few pillars a thoughtful person can genuinely see themselves inside. Then they name the major problems or challenges that need to be solved within those priorities. Free tuition forever. A world-class center for rehabilitation. Cancer research that changes the standard of care. These are not slogans. They are commitments broad enough to hold many programs and specific enough to feel real.

Then they listen for alignment rather than treating every wealthy prospect as a candidate for the general fund. The work is to discover which of those few priorities matches a particular donor’s own internal compass, what they return to in conversation, what lights them up, what they feel they must protect. A gift of this size is seldom a transaction. It is the recognition of something the donor already believed, now given a place to live.

This is also consistent with what we know about affluent donors more broadly. Research from Bank of America and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy has found that affluent donors most often choose causes because of personal values, interest in a particular issue, firsthand experience, the reputation of the nonprofit and the perceived need. In other words, major giving is not merely a response to institutional need. It is a response to alignment, trust, clarity and the belief that a gift can accomplish something worthy of the donor’s deepest commitments.

Around each priority, the institutions built for transformational giving create real infrastructure: the stories, the site visits, the vision documents, the leadership access, the research, the naming opportunities and the internal discipline to stay focused. Cultivation is not reinvented from scratch for every relationship. It is built around a clear set of pathways. And only then, inside the path the donor has already aligned with, do they personalize and make the ask.

The request, when it finally comes, is confident and specific. It invites the donor to complete something monumental that reflects who they already are. There is no apology in it and no scramble.

That is the difference between an operation built to sustain an institution and one built to transform it. The first asks donors to keep the lights on. The second offers them a place to pour their deepest convictions and leave a mark that outlives them. Both are honorable. Only one routinely produces the gift that makes headlines.

None of this requires the Jewish communal world to abandon what it does well or to manufacture charisma it supposedly lacks. The annual campaign and the ethic of mutual responsibility remain the floor beneath everything. What it requires is the willingness to run a second model alongside the first, a genuine major-gift architecture for the handful of relationships capable of changing an institution’s trajectory: Define the few priorities worth a lifetime gift. Qualify donors by what they actually care about, not by capacity alone. Build the assets that bring each priority to life. Then ask with the confidence the cause deserves.

Consider Michael and Susan Dell. They are among America’s most significant philanthropists, with more than $10 billion in philanthropic commitments. In December 2025, they pledged $6.25 billion to seed investment accounts for 25 million American children. Their own explanation was clear: they wanted to give children a financial head start, expand opportunity and invite families, employers, philanthropists, and communities into a greater national effort.

This spring, they made another extraordinary commitment to the University of Texas at Austin, bringing their lifetime support for the university above $1 billion and helping launch an AI-native medical center, advanced research campus, expanded scholarships, student housing and supercomputing capacity.

Those gifts were not small extensions of an annual campaign. They were large, vivid answers to large, vivid questions: How do we give millions of children a financial foundation? How do we build the future of medicine, computing and care in one place?

What we can say is that both institutions offered the Dells something unusually clear: a vast problem, a concrete mechanism, a public vision and the infrastructure to turn a historic commitment into a visible result.

Jewish institutions do not need to copy secular universities or medical centers. But we should learn from the architecture that makes gifts like these possible. Transformational donors are not only looking for need. They are looking for a place where their convictions can become concrete.

Jewish life has no shortage of such opportunities. Imagine a gift that makes Jewish day school affordable forever in a city. A gift that builds a national pipeline of Jewish educators. A gift that transforms mental health care in the Orthodox community. A gift that strengthens small communities before they collapse. A gift that gives every Jewish child, regardless of family income, a serious and beautiful Jewish education. A gift that turns Jewish literacy, Israel engagement or elder care from a chronic communal problem into a solved one.

These are not smaller dreams than the dreams being funded elsewhere. They are simply less often packaged, staffed, cultivated and asked for as lifetime opportunities.

The money, donors and convictions are there. The question is whether our institutions are ready to receive the gifts they say they want.

Jonah Halper is the founder of Altruicity and the author of Magnetic Mission: A Fundraiser’s Guide to Finding Donors Who Share Your True North. He works with Jewish nonprofits and foundations on relationship-driven, systems-oriented fundraising.