Half of all Israelis donate to charity every year — a fact that’s often overshadowed by the larger focus on Diaspora giving to Israeli causes — and they are increasingly doing it online.

According to the Israeli Giving Report, a new study by the Israeli crowdfunding platform JGive, roughly 1 in 5 Israeli donors now give through a website. The platform’s Israeli donor base has expanded by roughly 70% over five years, total giving on the platform has grown by close to 167% and the number of nonprofits raising funds through JGive has grown sixfold in seven years, climbing from about 500 organizations to upward of 3,000. Among Israel’s top donors, 6 in 10 are under 50.

Donor engagement from abroad accelerated sharply too. Donations from Diaspora Jewish funders on the platform also hit an all-time high in 2025 of nearly NIS 125 million ($42.7 million), helping push total giving on JGive to roughly NIS 400 million ($136.3 million) for the year, with engagement from donors abroad nearly tripling since the Oct. 7 terror attacks. 

Ori Ben Shlomo, JGive’s founder and CEO, doesn’t see any of this as a coincidence. He started building the platform in 2014, during his own military reserve service in the early days of that summer’s Gaza war, Operation Protective Edge, after concluding that Israelis’ desire to give was real, but the country lacked the infrastructure to make it happen. “The heart was there, but it was a mess,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy. 

JGive launched later that year as a nonprofit, and Ben Shlomo says it’s proven itself most in moments of crisis since.

JGive compiled the report from more than a decade of platform activity, several hundred million shekels’ worth of giving and survey responses from upwards of 10,000 active donors. While the surge in Diaspora philanthropy to Israel since Oct. 7 has been widely reported, the new study is mostly about Israeli philanthropy itself — including a shift in how Israeli wealth is being deployed. 

JGive Platinum, the platform’s donor-advised fund, drew support from 667 members in 2025, who together donated NIS 302 million ($102.9 million); NIS 85 million ($29 million) of that arrived as stock gifts, a category up 240% in a single year, during a period in which the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange itself posted record gains. 

Money flowing out of those funds exceeded NIS 204 million ($69.5 million) and reached 2,300 charities. Ben Shlomo sees this as a sign that a growing number of founders, investors and senior tech professionals are folding philanthropy into long-term financial planning, echoing practices long common in the United States. Ben Shlomo noted that he and his team were among the early advocates pushing Israel’s Tax Authority to create a donor-advised framework similar to the one used in the United States.

Ben Shlomo calls the old approach an “Uncle Sam” model: donors trusted the institutions and mailed in a check, and that was the extent of it. Today’s donors expect something closer to a real partnership. Donors increasingly want to know exactly where their money is going, he said, and a growing share prefer to give directly to specific Israeli causes rather than through a middleman such as a federation or an “American Friends of” organization, all while keeping their U.S. tax benefits intact through platforms like JGive.

JGive’s part in pushing Israelis to give in greater numbers themselves, he said, has made Diaspora donors more comfortable giving alongside them. That doesn’t mean federations are being squeezed out, he was careful to add, crediting them with a continued and significant role beyond simply moving money; what’s changed, he said, is that direct giving and federation giving increasingly coexist.

Ben Shlomo said he sees the numbers as proof of a mindset that’s accelerated sharply since Oct. 7. “It’s not [just] a nice to have, it’s a must-have,” he said of giving to Israel today. “We build the infrastructure,” he added, “but giving itself [both from Israeli and Diaspora donors] is the engine that drives a strong Israeli society.”