The Israeli government is investing $4 million through an initiative dubbed Project Aleph Bet to boost Jewish day schools in the United States, seeing them as a key element in maintaining and improving the relationship between Israel and American Jewry.

The investment, which comes from the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism’s education initiative UnitEd, is being run through the Jewish Federations of North America and Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, and will go toward seven day school-related projects across the country. It was first announced at the JFNA General Assembly earlier this month.

All of the parties involved described the $4 million donation as being less of a major financial investment and more of a symbolic gesture, albeit a powerful one, signifying a seal of approval by the Israeli government and a call for the philanthropic community to follow suit. 

“The funding from Aleph Bet enables important projects to move forward,” Paul Bernstein, the founding CEO of Prizmah, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “But it also encourages American philanthropists and gives them confidence when the State of Israel is standing in support.”

Assaf Gamzou, UnitEd’s director of education, said Project Aleph Bet, which was conceived some two years ago, was meant to be a far larger investment in Jewish education, but Israel’s budgetary strains in light of the past 14 months of war forced the initiative to be cut drastically.

“The initial dream was to put $40 million into initiatives to increase enrollment in Jewish day schools in North America,” Gamzou told eJP. “Then Oct. 7 happened, and we put it on pause, of course. A few months later, the minister came back to us, to UnitEd, and said, ‘Listen, I want us to do this, even if not in the initial scope.’ And so we came back with a strategy on how to invest $4 million. And the idea is we are partnering with initiatives and organizations that are trying to address the issue of enrollment in innovative and new ways and that we hope we can learn from and replicate what they’re doing.”

The funding will be directed to seven initiatives, some local and some national, in the United States: Prizmah’s Jewish Day School Endowment Initiative, which is working to build endowment funds for schools; NorCal Jewish Day Schools, which supports institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area; the Zalik Foundation’s Jewish communal professional grants, which offers tuition subsidies for people who work in the Jewish community; the recently launched Lauder Impact Initiative, which is looking to boost day school enrollment; the Tikvah Fund’s Emet Classical Academy, a new traditional Jewish day school in New York; Tamim Academy, a franchise model for Jewish day schools that is meant to make them easier to open in small communities; and EarlyJ, a Bay Area Jewish early childhood education initiative.

“We looked at a lot of projects, and they needed to be replicable, scalable, sustainable,” Gamzou said. “We also looked at whether they are offering something new to the field, something interesting and [something] that we thought could make a real impact.”

Gamzou said that each of these addressed the issue of Jewish day school enrollment in different ways, from affordability to “the question of excellence,” compared to public and non-Jewish private schools.

With EarlyJ, the idea was to find ways to build “a strong pipeline [from early childhood education] towards Jewish day school,” Gamzou said.

The Israeli investment in the American Jewish community  represents a reversal of the trends in Jewish fundraising since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, which has seen an unprecedented amount of philanthropic giving from American Jewry to Israel. 

Despite its somewhat modest scope, Bernstein added that Project Aleph Bet still — or even more so — sends “an important message and statement that [Israel is] still prioritizing [Jewish education] despite the limited resources at the government’s disposal.”

Gamzou said that this indeed was UnitEd and the ministry’s intent with this investment.

“What we want to do is convey a message that even now, even in these times, we see this investment in Jewish education as something important,” he said.

According to Sarah Eisenman, the outgoing chief community and Jewish life officer at JFNA, who has played an active role in the organization’s involvement with Project Aleph Bet, the initiative also comes as the American Jewish community is seeing a rise in interest in Jewish day schools.

“We believe that now is that moment to catalyze and launch that much larger initiative to grow enrollment. So for us, this investment is essential. But the beautiful element of it is what it communicates in terms of importance — that this is really important to invest in, particularly at this moment,” Eisenman told eJP.

According to Bernstein, there is greater enrollment interest at non-Orthodox Jewish day schools because of “the dual crises with the war [in Israel] and the growth in antisemitism.”

He added: “So we think the time is right to invest deeply to grow Jewish day schools further.”

Eisenman said one area that is ripe for growth is among parents who have already enrolled their children in non-Jewish private schools. In a recent JFNA study, 40% of them said they were “open to reconsidering school choice and summer programming.”

Eisenman said that JFNA has been working with the Diaspora Affairs Ministry and UnitEd for roughly two years on Project Aleph Bet, offering the Israeli government a “a major platform that can, on one hand, reach day schools and practitioners and partners across the country, but also activate a philanthropic base to support this effort.”

For JFNA, Eisenman said, this initiative is “one phase” of the organization’s “larger initiative to double [day school enrollment] over the next 10 years.”

She acknowledged that some of that growth will happen naturally, as Orthodox and Haredi families tend to have more children and also tend to send those children to day schools.

“Our priority focus will be on growing enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish day schools. Because… [with] non-Orthodox families, it’s about 9%, 10% who send their kids to a Jewish day school,” she said.

“How do we really leverage this moment and take advantage of this moment and serve those families and help them access Jewish day schools in ways that they’ve not been able to access Jewish day schools previously?” Eisenman said.

She noted that in addition to Project Aleph Bet, JFNA is working to establish a North American fund to make Jewish day schools more affordable and is working with Prizmah, which is developing a national marketing campaign to boost day schools.

“Four million dollars is very generous,” she said. “[But] we know that in the scheme of Jewish day schools, in order to grow enrollment, the need is vastly more than that.”

Following the JFNA General Assembly in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, the organization held an invite-only, three-hour gathering with 100 funders to discuss this issue, Eisenman said.

“We just had 100 funders coming together in D.C. specifically focused on how we might achieve this very ambitious goal [of doubling enrollment] over the next 10 years,” Eisenman said. “So we had 100 funders in the room — foundations and individual philanthropists from all across the country and Canada — really digging into this question of how can we do this and why now, why this moment is critical in achieving this.”

Eisenman said that while JFNA is pushing to establish a large central fund to help make day schools more affordable, this is not an issue that is going to be solved solely from the top-down.

“Our approach is that we believe there needs to be a continental effort, a major fund that we’re able to catalyze that can then provide matching resources to incentivize the growth of all of these local unique initiatives,” she said. “But it’s got to be a diverse approach. We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all. So if we’re able to raise and motivate national funders to support this effort, then federations can be able to motivate their local supporters and philanthropists and schools are able to motivate their supporters and funders and come up with unique approaches.”