The social justice-focused Dorot Foundation will be spending down its assets and shutting down in 2034, representatives from the foundation shared exclusively with eJewishPhilanthropy, citing “urgent challenges” for the Jewish community and threats to democracy in both the United States and Israel. As of last year, the foundation controlled $158 million in assets.

“Given the urgent challenges we face today, this is a time to fully utilize our resources,” Jeanie Ungerleider, who has served as president of the Dorot Foundation since 1994, said in a statement. 

According to Steven Jacobson, executive director of the foundation, political tensions and “challenges to democratic norms” in Israel and the United States are worsening equity and social justice issues, prompting the foundation to increase its investments, specifically in the protection of democratic systems. 

“The challenges to democratic norms, both in Israel and in the United States, have been a significant concern of ours… and have exacerbated many of the challenges that we had been previously focused on with respect to all kinds of equity and justice issues,” Jacobson told eJP. “We’ll remain focused on much of what we have been doing historically. I could imagine putting more resources toward the fight for protecting democratic systems, more specifically, both in Israel and the United States.” 

The Dorot Foundation (no connection to the New York-based social service agency of the same name) was created in 1972 by Ungerleider’s mother, Jewish philanthropist Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson. in its early days, the foundation focused its efforts on funding causes related to Jewish history, education and pluralism. The foundation created professorships of Judaic studies, supported several Jewish cultural and artistic institutions and endowed biblical archaeology projects. Specifically, Dorot was a primary funder of the archaeological excavation at Tel Migne-Ekron, a sprawling Iron Age site southwest of Jerusalem.

In 1990, the foundation launched the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, its flagship program that brings young Jewish professionals to Israel for 10 months to explore Jewish identity and Israeli society. The fellowship, which has brought some 400 people to Israel since its establishment, will be ending alongside the foundation. The fellowship’s final year will come at some point within the next eight years, Jacobson told eJP, although the precise timeline isn’t yet set.  

In recent years, the foundation’s grantmaking has supported a wide range of organizations including the New Israel Fund, which funds initiatives focused on advancing a liberal democracy in Israel; the Jewish Museum in New York, of which Dorot’s founder Ungerleider-Mayerson was curator, director and then a major supporter; the Hebrew Free Loan Society, the Hadar Institute, the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, the Jewish Women’s Archive and dozens more.

“We are proud of the outstanding work of our many grantees over these decades… More than anything else, our decision to spend down reflects our commitment to dramatically increase our efforts to achieve impactful social change,” said Ungerleider.  

The full details of Dorot’s spend down are still being determined, said Jacobson. The nonprofit has decided to announce its sunset before making those final considerations to provide grantees the time and runway to plan their next steps. 

“The headline is, in a sense, all that we know: that Dorot will be spending down over the course of the next eight years,” he said.