The $90 million matching grant recently awarded by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation to help the Cleveland’s five Jewish day schools to boost their educational system was not intended as a response to rising antisemitism following Oct. 7 — and yet, its significance in the current climate is undeniable, according to Jehuda Reinharz, the Mandel Foundation’s president and CEO.

The gift, he emphasized, is about fostering resilience for young people, a quality the foundation believes is more crucial than ever. And one that Jewish day schools can nurture.

“Jews have traditionally [faced] attacks, as they are now, by a great deal of antisemitism in this country and elsewhere,” said Reinharz, who spoke to eJewishPhilanthropy together with the foundation’s chairman of the board, Steve Hoffman, at the foundation’s hometown office in downtown Cleveland. “It is important for [Jewish youth] to know who they are. I know from my own kids’ experience [with Jewish day schools] and also from their friends, that they are proud of being Jews. It is important to them and they know how to respond and behave when they’re attacked. They don’t run away. We think giving young people this kind of resilience today is important.”

And schools are a vehicle for building that resilience, he said.

The foundation remains committed to its core areas of engagement — leadership and management of nonprofit organizations, promotion of the humanities (especially in higher education), urban engagement (particularly in Cleveland) and support for Jewish life and education in both the U.S. and Israel — but it has also expanded its efforts in response to the crisis in Israel, he said.

“Sometimes terrible things happen, like Oct. 7, so we go outside of our strict mission, but still in the same spirit, helping people in all kinds of ways. So we feel good about what the foundation is doing. The mission of the foundation, the statement, the initial statement is to improve the lives of all citizens in the United States and Israel. We truly believe in that mission,” said Reinharz, the former longtime president of Brandeis University.

He credited Hoffman with being the “driving force” behind the matching grant initiative. Making Jewish day schools affordable for Jewish families has long been an area of concern for Jewish communities nationwide.

“This is a very concrete example of what can be done if you have the leadership and the will to do it,” said Reinharz.

Two years in the making, the matching grant program came about as a result of ongoing discussions with the Cleveland federation’s president, Erika Rudin-Luria. Hoffman said providing a supportive financial model for Cleveland’s Jewish day schools had been on his list of “unfinished business.”

“The Cleveland Federation has been supporting day school education since 1940 when the Hebrew Academy was taken in as a beneficiary agency,” he said. “We’re in constant discussion with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland about our areas of interest, and this was on my list of unfinished business. We kind of batted things back-and-forth and [to] see what takes hold.”

The foundation’s initial $90 million will be matched by other donors, bringing the total project to $180 million. This funding is intended to help schools manage their capital needs, such as building expansions, and to enhance educational opportunities, including tuition support and scholarships.

“The challenge of financing day school education has been there for decades. What’s new is that we now have the resources because of the generosity of the [Mandel] brothers. Two of the three brothers left virtually their entire estates to the foundation, and the third brother made a significant contribution in his lifetime to the foundation,” said Hoffman.

The initiative, which is in line with one of the foundation’s core areas of engagement of support for Jewish life and education, allows each of the five eligible schools to determine how best to utilize the funds based on their specific needs. For example, some schools may focus on enhancing secular studies or improving facilities, while others may prioritize endowments for tuition support. This flexible approach aims to ensure that any family wishing to send their children to day school in Cleveland can do so, thereby strengthening the Jewish community’s educational infrastructure, said Reinharz.

The matching grant is also intended to contend with the issue of teacher retention and compensation as Jewish day schools, even within the Orthodox community, face difficulties in attracting and retaining qualified teachers, particularly in light of financial constraints for competitive salaries compared to public schools, he added.

“What people don’t understand is really how stretched these schools are in maintaining the quality of education. Teachers in those schools do not make a lot of money,” said Reinharz. There’s a lot of dedicated people who are there because they truly believe in the mission of those schools. These teachers are incredibly dedicated. They also have families to feed, yet they stay because they really believe in those schools, believe in the education, believe in what they do. Parents, too, have to stretch quite a bit. Even if they get some tuition [assistance], it’s still a big stretch for the communities. And the Cleveland Jewish community is growing”

Hoffman emphasized the collaborative nature of the Cleveland Jewish community, where major donors work together to achieve common goals. He believes that the community’s history of cooperation is crucial for the success of initiatives like the one supporting Jewish day schools.

“Another thing that’s important to us is that the entire community has an opportunity to participate in building our future,” he said. “This is not the Mandel Jewish community. We’re citizens in the Jewish community. We’re generous donors in the community. But there are other generous donors and we want them to join with us, as has been the pattern in Cleveland. Cleveland has a long history of the major donors working with each other to accomplish the communal agenda. It’s never one person here, one person there, but everybody comes together to make the good things happen. That’s been happening here for decades and decades and decades.”

While the Mandel Foundation’s grant is significant and tailored to the specific needs of the Cleveland Jewish community, there is hope that it will inspire other communities to undertake similar projects, he said, noting that they have received positive reactions from various communities, indicating interest in replicating this model elsewhere.

“I think if the brothers are listening to us, I think they’d be proud because that’s really what they wanted. From the moment they started making money way back… and could feed their families and put some money in the bank, they started making these kinds of gifts,” said Reinharz. “They remembered where they came from.”

Cleveland is a unique community, largely due to its well-organized institutions and a “highly committed” group of individuals who support a wide range of activities within the Jewish community, a commitment that spans generations, Reinharz said. Jewish education has always been a key focus for the federation and other community organizations, with strong support for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox schools. This dedication to education stems from the belief that without it, many young Jews would lack a strong connection to their heritage, identity, and the broader Jewish community, he said.

In addition, said Hoffman, there has been growing interest in both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish day school education as Cleveland’s Jewish community has shrunk less than expected and young people with families return to their hometown, rediscovering its affordability.

“There are many communities which have the resources to do what we’re doing. It just requires generous donors to rethink the value of Jewish day schools in their communities and to step forward and challenge their peers to create a stronger base for the day school movement,” said Hoffman. “If you ask what are [the remaining] unfinished areas of business, it’s the other areas of Jewish education, synagogue-based, the informal base, the [summer] camping base. There’s a lot more work to be done there, and we have some experiments going.”