Nearly 20 years ago, attorney Sandor “Sandy” Frankel’s life forever changed as his former client, Leona Helmsley, named him as one of five trustees of her charitable foundation. When she died in 2007, that trust was just a small fraction of what it eventually became, only being used as a vehicle for individual, low-level donations. But as her assets and wealth were posthumously transferred into the trust, it suddenly became worth some $5.4 billion — for him and his counterparts to award as they saw fit.

“We had to determine what programs the trust would have. My interest was Israel, and we all agreed on that. That’s how this all started,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy last Sunday. 

The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust operates in the United States and around the world, primarily in health-related and place-based areas. Since 2010, the trust’s Israel program has issued more than $700 million in grants to institutions and organizations in Israel, mainly universities and hospitals, but also the Jewish Agency for Israel, agricultural projects, emergency services and advocacy programs. Most recently, the trust awarded $1 million to an Israeli nonprofit working with youth and adults with disabilities, Tsad Kadima, to help it construct a new center in Jerusalem. 

“When you think of the money that the country has to spend just to survive enemies from outside and inside, it’s really a privilege to be of some help,” he said. 

“I’m a lucky guy who was given a golden opportunity and am trying to make the most of it,” said Frankel, who wrote a book about that turn of events, The Accidental Philanthropist. “I think we’ve spotted a lot of places that could and have profited from getting funding. We’ve helped people, saved lives and helped make lives better.” 

Frankel arrived in Israel last Tuesday for his first visit since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks to review existing grant recipients and consider future ones, he said last Sunday ahead of the 12-day visit.

“We are going to go to a number of our grantees to see what’s happening on the ground, to some of the hospitals and some of the other places we’ve funded. We’ll go to the [Israel] Antiquities Authority campus [to which the trust donated $3 million]. We’ll go to the south for several days and the north for several days,” Frankel said. “It will be a hectic and packed trip.” 

In the south, Frankel, his wife and the few other members of his team will visit Sderot’s Sapir College, the town of Netivot and Kibbutz Be’eri — all three of which have received support in from the trust; most recently, Be’eri received a $2.2 million grant for agricultural equipment last month, after much of the kibbutz’s farming equipment was damaged and stolen during the Oct. 7 attacks. “It’s not accidental that we gave to Be’eri and for that purpose,” Frankel said. “They explained to us what their needs were.”

In Netivot, the Helmsley Charitable Trust has been a major donor to the new Hadassah – Helmsley Medical Center that is being built there. Last year, the trust donated more than $5 million for the center, along with an additional nearly $1 million to help it attract top medical staff.

In the north, they will visit the Galilee towns of Kiryat Shmona and Metula — both of which were evacuated and heavily bombarded by the Hezbollah terrorist group — as well as the Golan Heights, he said.

Frankel stressed that the trust’s grantmaking is “completely nonpolitical.”

“We just try to help the people of Israel,” he said. “From time to time, we meet with people in the political sphere — I’ll be meeting on this trip with President [Isaac] Herzog — but what we do and how we look at possibilities and where we put our money has zero basis in political considerations.”

“That is not to say that from time to time we are not approached by people with political leanings or political ambitions, but that’s not an arena we play in, and I think people know that by now,” he said.

Frankel said that the trust’s Israel program operates with a small staff — though they have no Israel-based personnel — and keeps its overhead as low as possible.

“There’s no fat on the bone,” he said. “Our staff is excellent but very small — a program director, two program officers and an executive assistant. With that small handful of people, we look at everything we think may be of interest… We don’t suffer from corporate bloat. We just try to have an impact, and we deal directly with the institutions and the people who will control our money.”

He said that this came from a sense of “fiscal responsibility” to ensure that the trust’s money is only spent “where it can do good.”

With such a small staff, the trust relies on its grantees to recommend what requires funding, rather than performing its own studies of the country’s needs and the activities of other grantmakers, and then performs its own assessments to determine where it can have the most impact.

“We don’t set people’s priorities. They tell us what their needs are. We never tell people what we would like to do,” he said. 

“You could study to death what other organizations are doing,” he said. “The best way to learn is to go there and look at it with your own eyes.”

Frankel added, however, that the trust is not naive or thoughtless. “We evaluate what [potential grantees] are saying, we don’t take it blindly. We are trying to be as impactful as possible,” he said. “We’ve certainly met with institutions that we’ve assessed as not having a true need. We are pretty careful about where we give the money.”

As the trust has grown in size, it has been able to significantly increase the level of grantmaking, particularly over the past three years. Consider: In the first 11 years of its Israel operations, the trust awarded $375 million in grants. In the past four years, it has awarded nearly the same amount. 

“Those numbers show that the investment part of the organization is doing excellent work, so our budget has grown larger,” he said. “We started with roughly $5.4 billion. We have given out, trust-wide, roughly $4.5 billion, and we now have slightly over $7 billion. Our mandate is to exist in perpetuity — which is a long time.”

Operating at that scale means that the Helmsley Charitable Trust is able to take on projects and grants that other charitable organizations cannot. 

“I can remember visiting Rambam [Health Care Campus] with [its then director, Dr.] Rafi Beyar, and we were standing on a piece of land, and he said, ‘I have a vision for building a center here,’ and he described it. I remember, I took a twig and put it on the ground and said, ‘You want to build it here?’ And he said, ‘Yes’ — And now there’s a 20-story building there,” Frankel said, referring to the Helmsley Health Discovery Tower medical research facility.

But Frankel stressed that even small donations can have a major impact, offering as an example the 2019 Halle, Germany, synagogue shooting, in which a far-right German extremist tried to break into a synagogue on Yom Kippur. People inside saw him approach through a security camera and locked the entrance to the building. Though the gunmen killed two people on the street, “lives were saved because he couldn’t get in,” Frankel said. The security system “cost less than $20,000,” which had been paid for by the Jewish Agency. “And the Jewish Agency got those funds from the Helmsley Charitable Trust — so a relatively small amount of money can have a very large impact,” he said.