Global Jewry, the emerging network of international Jewish organizations, awarded its inaugural prizes for collaboration to Mem Global’s Jewish Learning Collaborative and to a joint initiative by Jewtina y Co. on Wednesday, giving each a $10,000 cash prize for initiatives undertaken in partnership with other Jewish organizations. 

Global Jewry, which marked its second anniversary this summer, launched the prizes in September to encourage collaboration and cooperation among Jewish groups, its founder, Sandy Cardin, told eJewishPhilanthropy at the time.

The prize ceremony was held shortly after Global Jewry received a grant — for an undisclosed sum — from philanthropist Mike Leven, founder of the Jewish Future Promise, to create the Global Roundtable Fund to support additional new collaborations across the Jewish world, the organization said. 

In a virtual ceremony on Wednesday, the Shoshana Shoubin Cardin Prize for Exemplary Collaboration, which is named for Cardin’s mother, a pioneering woman in Jewish communal life, was awarded to Mem Global’s Jewish Learning Collaborative, which is run in partnership with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Yesod program, which supports Jewish professionals, and the Paideia Institute’s Renaissance Hub. The collaborative pairs participants with an educator for Jewish study based on the topic and frequency of their choice. Last year, the initiative ran a pilot in Europe, resulting in “144 hours of Jewish learning in nine languages,” Jessica Abo, the award ceremony’s host, said at the event. The finalists were initiatives by Academia Judaica and by Hillel in Central Asia and Southeastern Europe.

Rabbi Ana Bonnheim, who directs the program, said the prize money would allow the initiative to expand further. “We are absolutely honored to be receiving the Global Jewry prize for collaboration. We are shocked, thrilled, so excited to continue to bring Jewish learning to more Jewish leaders in Europe and around the world,” Bonnheim said.

The Global Jewry Prize for Emerging Collaboration was presented to Jewtina y Co. for its partnership with Lazos Internacional on a program connecting Latin Jewish young adults from the U.S. with peers in Lazos’ young adult network in Chile. Through the initiative, the two groups will discuss “how migration patterns, language, assimilation pressures and national contexts shape Jewish identity differently across the Americas, while examining what it means to create modern Latin Jewish culture together,” Abo said. 

Unlike the recipients of the Cardin Prize, who received the prize money immediately, the emerging collaboration prize provides seed funding for the new partnership, with 50% paid immediately and 50% at the submission of a six-month progress report. The finalists were Beit Ruth for Young Women and Girls at Risk and Habayta. 

Analucia Lopezrevoredo, the founder and CEO of Jewtina, said that the funding will allow her organization to run a program that she expects to have far-reaching consequences within the Latin Jewish community. “It will reshape our programs; expand our imaginations about what Latin Jewish connection can become across the Americas; and teach us how powerful it is to bring together communities who rarely get to meet, but who share a deep cultural and ancestral thread,” Lopezrevoredo said. “This experience will also remind us that global Jewish identity is not a single story. It’s a mosaic.”

The prize committee comprised Jewish leaders from around the world, with representatives from the U.S., U.K., Israel, Spain, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, Hungary and Hong Kong. The committee was chaired by David Hatchwell Altaras and Jill Smith, with Avital and Natan Sharansky and Stuart E. Eizenstat, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, serving as honorary chairs. The funding for the prizes was provided by Lee Liberman, Rafi Musher and Lara Seligman, Jeffrey Solomon and Audrey Weiner, and Kimberly Miller Rubenfeld.

Ahead of the award ceremony, Cardin told eJP that he was pleased with the level of interest in the prizes and the quality of the applicants. 

“It was the first time, so we weren’t sure exactly how it would work out. We are very pleased by the end… with the quality and the quantity of the applications,” he said, noting his appreciation for the selection committee and for the prize’s funders. 

Created in the summer of 2023, Global Jewry quickly grew to include hundreds of member organizations. It was created as an homage to Ilia Salita, the CEO and president of the Genesis Philanthropy Group, who died in 2020 and had helped spearhead the initiative Our Common Destiny, which also sought to bring together Jewish organizations from around the world. 

Over the past  2 ½ years, the organization has refined its purpose, focusing now on improving collaboration and communication between Jewish organizations and their leaders. 

“What we’re trying to do is create this environment for greater conversation, communication, cooperation and collaboration,” Cardin said. “But [the organizations] are the ones that are going to have to do it. It’s not going to be a top-down thing. What we can do is create this climate and environment for it, and have a platform that makes it as easy as possible.”

The new grant from Leven will help make that possible, Cardin said.“These roundtables that we’ve been doing, which we started last year, are an important piece of our puzzle,” he said. “We will pilot that this year, with some small grants out of our Global Roundtable Fund, and then we’ll see.”