When the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 1987 to found and support Jewish schools across Europe, revealed on Wednesday that it will sunset that support in seven cities in 2027 and send the network off with a final $75 million gift, it was new news in the sense that it was just announced, but also old news in the sense that this moment had been coming for years. 

In a wide-ranging interview with eJewishPhilanthropy in July, Ronald Lauder spoke of his hope for his eponymous foundation’s flagship school systems across Europe to become self-sufficient, with the foundation’s support ultimately replaced by support from the parents and philanthropists within the communities it incubated. While Jewish education would continue to play a foundational role in the future of the Jewish people, he said, handing off the torch to next-generation philanthropists would be equally imperative for that continuity.

The foundation is sunsetting funding for programs in Athens, Berlin, Prague, Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Hungary and Sofia, Bulagria, and handing off responsibility for the schools to their respective communities, according to yesterday’s statement. Of the $75 million send-off gift, $40 million is earmarked for new school facilities, and the remainder is intended to cover operations through 2028 and additional resources to prepare the communities for the transition.

“The transition aims to enable the schools to become fully equipped to sustain themselves for generations to come and reflects Mr. Lauder’s long-held view that philanthropy should empower and strengthen those it supports, rather than creating permanent dependency,” the statement said.

Lauder has long hinted at scaling back support for its international programming. At a symposium in 2017 marking the foundation’s 30th anniversary, Lauder encouraged other philanthropists to step in and support the project in order to reduce reliance on his foundation alone. In 2024, his call was answered in part when the Yael Foundation partnered with the Lauder Foundation to pledge a total of $15.5 million toward shoring up and expanding the Jewish school in Rome.

Rome’s community president, Victor Fadlun, said that when he first pitched Lauder on a project to expand Jewish schools in Rome for nearly $30 million, the philanthropist told him bluntly that the project “had no chance of succeeding without serious external support.” Days later, Fadlun recalled, the Lauder Foundation committed over $9 million. 

“For many years, knowing that one of the greatest philanthropists in the Jewish world believed in us, believed in our communities, and was willing to invest alongside us, gave us something that money alone can never provide: optimism, courage, and most importantly, confidence in our future,” Fadlun said.

While according to the release, the foundation “will remain active,” not included is what the foundation will focus on after 2027. Since 2024, Lauder himself has begun to dip its toes into domestic Jewish education initiatives, specifically through the Lauder Impact Initiative, his first North American-facing program, which seeks to reverse the trend of long-declining enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish day schools. In the July interview, Lauder also called for philanthropists to allocate $1 billion towards Israel’s public relations battle.

The foundation’s statement noted that “[a]s this chapter concludes, Mr. Lauder remains a passionate philanthropist for Jewish education and other causes he holds most dear, in the areas of the arts, education, medical and scientific research, Israel and Jewish life, and other civic and cultural causes.”

Even as Lauder urges other philanthropists to pick up the torch, the announcement marks the beginning of the end of a 40-year chapter of the foundation’s philanthropy — the origins of which, according to Lauder’s own retelling in the July interview, tie directly back to his time as U.S. ambassador to Austria in the late 1980s.

A kindergarten had been set up for children of Soviet Jews who, when passing through Austria, decided to stay, Lauder told eJP. After visiting it, he made a decision the next day to build a school, buying up the apartments next door until, in his words, “we had a Jewish school in Vienna.” Requests to build schools elsewhere followed, he said. Over the next decades, the foundation opened 30 schools throughout Eastern Europe, which, 40 years on, have over 40,000 alumni “some in communities that people thought had no Jews left,” he said.

“I think back to that kindergarten in Vienna,” Lauder said in yesterday’s statement announcing the transition, “and to all the children, parents, teachers and community leaders I have been privileged to meet since that day. I think about the courage it took for families to reclaim traditions that history had tried so violently to extinguish.” 

“No one should mistake the success of these communities for the end of the need for Jewish philanthropy,” he added. “I hope a new generation of philanthropists will look at what happened here and see not a mission that has ended, but proof of what is possible when we invest seriously and patiently in Jewish education.”