Before the pilot cohort of the Maimonides Jewish Leadership Institute has even completed its first year, efforts are already underway to expand the nascent fellowship program, a project of Maimonides Fund. 

For starters, Mijal Bitton — co-founder and a spiritual leader of Manhattan’s The Downtown Minyan and one of the fund’s inaugural scholars in residence — is coming on board as dean of MJLI on Aug. 31, Maimonides Fund has shared exclusively with eJewishPhilanthropy.

“We were so impressed with the original cohort and so impressed with the impact that it was having on them, we didn’t want to lose a year,” Maimonides Fund President Mark Charendoff told eJP of the decision to begin expanding so soon. 

MJLI presently operates exclusively in New York City and Los Angeles, with the goal of expanding to additional communities over the next several years. The organization is also seeking to hire a director, who will be tasked with overseeing that growth, Charendoff said. 

“I’m thrilled to be taking on the role of dean of MJLI, developing its curriculum and content and serving as one of its core faculty,” Bitton told eJP. “The Jewish people are facing tremendous challenges and new opportunities right now, and I’m proud to be part of a bold new vision — one where we support leaders across industries with Jewish community, Jewish wisdom,and Jewish learning. We’ve already seen MJLI’s transformative effect, and I’m excited to see even more.”

MJLI arrives at a moment when the world of Jewish leadership fellowships is in flux. In recent years, Schusterman Family Philanthropies has stepped back from operating programs directly, closing its Schusterman Fellowship in 2024 and shutting down ROI Community this year after two decades. The Wexner Foundation, meanwhile, announced in May that it will spin off its North American leadership programs into an independent nonprofit next year, backed by a $40 million gift from Les and Abigail Wexner, a move the foundation’s president called long-planned, though it followed renewed alumni scrutiny of Wexner’s ties to Epstein.

MJLI is a yearlong fellowship program that provides Jewish learning, leadership training and community building for professionals in fields ranging from entertainment to law to journalism. What the fellows have in common, according to Charendoff, is that they have reached senior standing in their careers without a strong Jewish background.

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, there was a wave of interest from professionals who wanted entry points for engaging with the Jewish community, he said. The program grew out of an educational vision developed by Bitton and Rabbi David Wolpe while they served together as the funds’ scholars in residence: “A combination of finding a highly curated group that was… kind of an A-Team,” said Charendoff, “and giving them a combination of Jewish-rootedness, Israel-rootedness and an opportunity for activism — that was what we were after.”

“Nobody hands you a leadership credential at the end,” Jarrod Bernstein, policy director and counsel at Morrison Cohen LLP and an MJLI fellow, said of the program. “You leave with a room full of people who’ve pushed back on you all year and a community you actually feel obligated to.” 

“At a moment when everyone wants to tell Jews what being Jewish means, MJLI does the opposite — it makes you figure it out for yourself, alongside people who take the question as seriously as you do,” Bernstein said.

As dean of the program, Bitton will primarily shape the curriculum and educational vision of the fellowship alongside Wolpe, also a scholar in residence at the fund. The “nuts and bolts” of running the program will be the responsibility of the future director, said Charendoff.  

In addition to Bitton’s role as spiritual leader of The Downtown Minyan, she served as a visiting researcher at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service studying Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish life and current affairs. She is also a writer and co-host of the podcast Wondering Jews. Charendoff pointed to that background as what drew the fund to her in the first place, describing her Mizrahi perspective on Jewish life as “different, and in a healthy way,” from what he called a more mainstream communal approach. 

“She’ll continue teaching and writing and serving as a public figure, which we think is valuable, and we want her to continue doing,” Charendoff said, but her role at MJLI will be “her primary professional identity.” 

Charendoff described MJLI as an exception to a personal rule that foundations shouldn’t operate programs themselves, drawing a parallel to Sapir, the journal Maimonides Fund launched only after no existing outlet was willing to build what the organization had in mind. 

“I would have preferred to have given a grant to someone to do this,” Charendoff said of MJLI, “but there was not an institution out there that I thought was the right fit.”

“We’re also flexible enough that when there’s a reason to make an exception to the rule, we’ll make an exception to the rule,” he said.