At a Manhattan benefit for Americans for Ben-Gurion University on Sunday night, the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation announced a $2 million matching grant to support the medical school’s recovery from the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iranian missile strike that damaged academic facilities in June.

The event, held in midtown Manhattan, drew several hundred supporters of the university for an evening that included a comedy show from Emmy Award-winning comedian Alex Edelman, and testimony from Sasha Troufanov, an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in a ceasefire deal in February. 

The event came as A4BGU’s CEO, Doug Seserman, announced that he will be stepping down from his role as CEO, for retirement, or rather “re-wirement,” as he described it in a speech at the event. Starting next month, Ian Benjamin, A4BGU’s current interim CFO, will become interim CEO, as the nonprofit begins the search for Seserman’s permanent successor. 

In his speech announcing the matching grant, real estate developer Lloyd Goldman, who serves as chairman of the university’s board of trustees, said he and his family were dedicated to seeing the war-battered university rebuilt. Goldman and his sisters, Katja Goldman Sonnenfeldt and Dorian Goldman Israelow, have long supported the university’s medical school, which was named for their parents in 1995.

“We have, my sisters and I, made sure that the medical school was endowed. We’ve always tried to make sure it is the best among the best in the world, and we want to see the medical school educational building and its facilities rebuilt,” said Goldman. 

The missile that struck the Soroka University Medical Center campus in Beersheva in late June destroyed six research laboratories and damaged some 40 other buildings. According to the university’s rector, Chaim Hames, the greatest loss was decades’ worth of “bench-to-bedside” research — applied studies conducted at the teaching hospital that directly contributed to the development of medical treatments.

“It’s, you know, windows broken, frames out of place, doors shattered, ceilings collapsing, but nothing that can’t be that couldn’t be repaired. The greater damage was, of course, done to Soroka, where a building where the university has a couple of floors of labs was actually pretty much destroyed,” Hames told eJewishPhilanthropy. “A lot of that material was lost, and will take time to start again and gather all the samples needed to recover.”

Hames also decried what he described as a lack of response from the Israeli government to the damage sustained by the teaching hospital, crediting donors for supporting the university through wartime. 

“Our friends from the university, the donors, have been very, very generous since the start of the war, because we have thousands and thousands of students in miluim [reserve duty] who very much needed financial support,” he told eJP. “We sadly can’t say the same for the Israeli government. Soroka Hospital has still not yet gotten the money from the government to rebuild the building that was damaged. Again, it’s the only hospital that serves over a million people… If this hospital had been in the center of the country, they would have started the procedures immediately, and we would be further along than we are.”