PANO POLEMIDIA, Cyprus — On a hilltop outside the Cypriot seafront city of Limassol, Rabbi Yehoshua Smukler motions to a figure-eight plot of land across the valley, adjacent to Noah’s Retreat Dog Hotel and Daycare and the local cemetery. The dirt lot, currently covered in bulldozers, excavators, foundation drilling rigs and other heavy earthworks equipment, represents perhaps the Jewish education-focused Yael Foundation’s biggest bet to date.

The plan is to construct on the site a state-of-the-art, English-language Jewish school for the small but rapidly growing Jewish population of Cyprus, which the organization hopes will serve as the hub of Jewish life for the community on the island, Smukler, who will lead the Cyprus Jewish Academy of Excellence, told a group of journalists who accompanied him to the construction site of the new school during the Yael Foundation’s conference last week. 

But beyond Cyprus’ borders, the flagship nondenominational Jewish school is also meant to serve as a template for other Jewish schools and as a training ground for educational innovation that the foundation can use to assist the schools it supports around the world, according to Yael’s executive director, Chaya Yosovich.

“Part of the idea is to have this be a sort-of model,” she said. Indeed, throughout the conference, Smukler could be seen sitting with representatives from existing and planned Jewish day schools from around the world, consulting with him on design and curriculum choices. 

Since launching in 2020, the foundation — founded by Uri and Yael Poliavich — has quickly grown into one of the largest funders of Jewish education projects around the world, focusing mainly on communities in Europe, South America and elsewhere that are less addressed by other large philanthropies. This rapid rise in funding has accompanied an effort by the organization to professionalize: In October 2023, Yosovich was brought on board to lead the foundation. Her deputy, Naomi Kovitz, was hired a few months later. The group also hired Simmy Allen, the former international spokesperson for Yad Vashem, as its head of marketing a few weeks before its annual conference.

At the foundation’s annual conference in Cyprus last week, Uri Poliavich, the founder of the leading sports betting platform Soft2Bet, announced that the organization’s budget for giving would increase to nearly $42 million — nearly double the level from the year before and quadruple what it was in 2023. In his address at the conference, Poliavich highlighted the organization’s efforts in the past year in numerical terms, noting that over the past year the foundation went from operating in 29 countries to 37, increased the number of its projects from 60 to 100, and growing the number of students it reaches by 55% to 56,000.

The still young organization has had to balance this rapid growth with a desire to be effective and efficient.

“We don’t want to do it slowly, but we’re also trying to do it right, so it’s like running a marathon and sprinting at the same time,” Yosovich told eJewishPhilanthropy on the sidelines of the conference last week. 

“It’s a juggle,” she said. “Numbers are very important for Uri — he wants more schools and more kids and more things. But we want to make sure we’re investing in the right places and the right things, and it’s not only about numbers, it’s also about the quality.”

Speaking to the 200 educators from 37 countries who attended the conference, Yosovich said that the foundation would expect more metrics and measurements going forward. “We do want to measure and know that… things are going to move the needle,” she said. “We’re not going to change everything, but at least we know that some things are accomplished. We don’t want to be over-bureaucratic — we want to just have the right balance,” she said. 

Yosovich added that a difficulty the foundation faces in being overly metric-focused is the vast differences between the communities that it supports. “Here is a community of 40 people, and here is a community of 5,000. It’s one of the challenges of Europe,” she said. “The challenges that they have in this small place and in that huge one are very different.” 

One area that the Yael Foundation will focus on in terms of metrics for schools is the engagement of parents and the wider families with the schools, which Yosovich said can be seen as a measurable indicator of quality. If a school hosts a Shabbaton, for instance, “you can’t measure how good it was, but the fact that the parents are coming means that there’s something going on over there,” she said. 

In general, Yosovich said the foundation was prioritizing positive Jewish experiences, even above academics, under the belief that over-emphasizing Jewish formal learning may alienate would-be students and push them away from their Jewish identity.

“So they should come to the school and just focus on experiences. They should just remember the Hanukkah party and the Kabbalat Shabbat, so that when they grow up they have something inside and you’re not going to lose them completely,” she said. “So we’re trying to really also encourage the schools to focus on experiences as much as they can.”

In addition to Jewish events at schools, Yosovich said this meant encouraging extracurricular activities as well, including youth movements. She added that the Yael Foundation will not directly fund youth movements and will instead provide funding to the communities that it works with and they can decide which youth groups are the best fit for them — if it’s Chabad’s CTeen, the Israeli Scouts or something else. 

While institutions in Jewish communities in Europe — and all around the world — often have a zero-sum mentality, Yosovich said she tries to impress upon the schools that Yael Foundation works with that other Jewish schools in their community are not their enemies but are fellow travelers.

“I ask them, ‘Who’s the competition? If they say another Jewish school, I say, ‘They’re not the competition. They have Jewish kids and you have Jewish kids, and you both want to do the same thing. The other [non-Jewish] schools — these are the competition,’ Yosovich said. 

“It’s hard for them to understand because they felt the whole time that the other Jewish school is the competition. So that’s like really one of the things that we’re trying very hard. In some communities, it’s working very nicely; in some communities, it’s OK; and in some, it’s still a dream because, you know, it’s Jewish people,” she said, punctuating it with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders.  

In general, both Yosovich and Uri Poliavich said that the Yael Foundation wants to be an enabler of Jewish education, rather than the direct organizer of it. Holding up a lighter during his onstage address, Poliavich compared the foundation to the butane inside as he tried unsuccessfully to light it. “??Seems like it doesn’t work. You know what’s missing? It’s full of oil. What’s missing is spark, and the spark, that’s you guys. I can give the oil, I can give the cash, but without you guys, this thing will never light,” he said. 

Yosovich said the foundation is increasingly partnering with other Jewish organizations around the world that are focused on education initiatives. Last year, for instance, Yael Foundation joined the Lauder Foundation on a project to significantly expand the Rome Jewish community’s school. 

According to Yosovich, these partnerships started based on her and others’ existing connections to these foundations, but that these have grown as Yael has expanded its operations. 

“We’re already getting a lot of requests and introductions from other foundations as well. I would say that most of the foundations, maybe all of them, working around Europe and on Jewish education are in touch with us,” she said.

A well-deserved break

Many of the attendees — school principals, educators and community heads — described the foundation’s three-day conference, which was held this year at the luxury Parklane Hotel in Limassol, as a high point of their year. In addition to the posh seaside resort setting, the foundation brought in a range of speakers, some who directly discussed education-related matters and others who were meant to expand the attendees’ thinking about Zionism, entrepreneurship and management. They included: Hollywood animator Saul Blinkoff; Iris Haim, whose son Yotam was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and who was accidentally killed by Israeli troops; Jewish Agency Chair Doron Almog; basketball player Tamir Goodman; and Israeli media personality Sivan Rahav Meir, among others. The conference also featured a performance by Israeli singer Ishai Ribo.

Unlike the Prizmah Conference, which took place at almost the same time, the Yael Foundation gathering was, in large part, less of a professional development opportunity — though there was plenty of that as well — and more of a retreat. 

“We feel like they deserve these two days of just getting out of the schools and communities and getting some inspiration, getting some tools,” Yosovich said. “We feel that it’s very important for them. They’re an all-in community — they’re working 24/7.” 

Big plans

Back on the construction site outside of Limassol, Smukler has big plans for the “Cyprus Jewish Academy of Excellence,” which he hopes to expand to eventually include an early childhood education center, housing nearby for faculty and staff and dormitories for boarders, whom he said would likely come from small Jewish communities in Europe that can’t sustain their own schools. 

But even before this, Smukler said, the school — which will use an International Baccalaureate program — will feature a full-size soccer pitch, a “properly outfitted” 900-seat auditorium, a beit midrash and synagogue, music rehearsal spaces, dance studios, robotics workshops and more. (The view of the cemetery will be blocked by trees that they intend to plant soon, he said.)

“We’re gonna have a huge, huge catering facility. We spent months designing that kitchen. We can have an output of 3,000 meals a day — breakfast and lunch — with ease. It’s going to become the largest kosher catering on the island,” Smukler said.

“We expect the school to be in use day and night, early morning sports, music, rehearsals, activities, extracurriculars, extramural [sports] after school, lots of robotics, and extra learning for those people that want more of a yeshiva, a more Orthodox track. There will also be a tremendous, tremendous volume of performing arts — music will be a very, very, very big part,” he said.

According to Smukler, the school anticipates that the local Jewish population — which he estimated to comprise some 4,000 families, roughly 70% of them made up of Israeli expats — will readily send their children to the school. (Uri and Yael Poliavich, originally from the former Soviet Union, are among the island’s Jewish inhabitants.) The vast majority already send their children to non-Jewish, English-language private schools and are therefore used to paying private school tuition, he noted. The tuition for the new school — from $6,800 for lower grades to $13,600 for high grades — is roughly in line with local rates; and unlike other schools in Cyprus, which are for-profits, the new academy will offer financial assistance to those in need.

Smukler told eJP that the school expects to open with approximately 400 students and grow within a few years to 1,000, with a maximum capacity of approximately 1,250. At that level, Smukler said that the school expects to be financially sustainable after two to three years (not including repaying the initial investment for construction).

“The school itself,” he said, “is gonna be a community school with different offerings and levels of Judaism and Jewish education involvement. But it’s gonna be a very, very Jewish school, in terms of its feel and experience. It’s gonna be a Zionist school, a very proud Zionist school.” 

The Yael Foundation provided eJP with transportation and accommodation for the conference.