In August 2025, Shmuel and Anat Harlap pledged $180 million to Rabin Medical Center in Petach Tikva, among the largest gifts ever made by Israeli philanthropists to an Israeli institution. Earlier that year, when cybersecurity company Wiz announced its sale to Google for $32 billion, the founders pledged 1% of company stock to charity, a stake worth $320 million at the time of the deal. These are gifts from Israelis at a scale that would have seemed not merely unlikely but inconceivable when I published what may have been the first English-language series on Israeli philanthropic culture in 2013.

The data from that time told a different story. Israeli philanthropy represented 0.74% of the country’s GDP, compared to 2.1% in the United States. Only 4% of donations came from affluent Israelis giving more than NIS 100,000 ($33,000), despite roughly 10,000 individuals having the means to do so. A 2008 survey found that 67% of the Israeli public was “suspicious, cynical and skeptical” of philanthropy. 

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The Zionist enterprise had been built on checks from abroad. The Israelis I spoke with in 2013 returned, again and again, to the same idea: army service and high taxes were civic contribution enough.

Thirteen years later, the distance between those numbers and the gifts of 2025 is the story of how Israeli philanthropy evolved.

The wealth came first, then the builders

The transformation starts with economics. Israel today is home to 186,000 millionaires holding roughly $791 billion in assets, and median wealth grew 30% in 2024, the fifth-highest rate of any country in UBS’ global wealth report. Tech “exits” reached $58.8 billion in 2025, a 340% increase over the prior year, continuing a decade-long surge that has minted new fortunes at a pace no one modeled in 2013. What used to be a few dozen names with the means to give meaningfully has become a class.

Wealth creates capacity. It does not, on its own, create culture.

The core argument I made in 2013 was that Israel’s emerging donor class would give like entrepreneurs: with vision, defined goals, accountability and active engagement in the causes they chose. Not checkwriters — builders.

In some corners, that prediction had already been proven. Tmura, the public-service venture fund founded in 2002 by Yadin Kaufmann, spent two decades quietly building the equity-pledge model: companies donate stock, typically 0.5 to 1% of share capital, and Tmura converts the proceeds of exits into grants for education and youth causes. The Wiz founders’ pledge followed the same playbook. Today, Tmura holds equity from more than 825 Israeli companies, has seen 165 successful exits, and has generated over NIS 100 million ($33 million) for charity.

The infrastructure caught up. Donor-advised funds, which did not exist in Israel until 2019, have moved fast on the same logic. Keshet, the first Israeli DAF, has accumulated NIS 1.3 billion ($433 million) in assets since launch, distributing NIS 665 million ($222 million) in grants to more than 1,300 nonprofits, with NIS 420 million ($140 million) deposited in 2025 alone.

Philanthropy is now being discussed not as something successful Israelis might do in retirement, but as a component of a deal itself, baked into exits and IPOs. Younger founders are treating giving as part of their identity as builders, not a milestone to reach later. The business tool kit had arrived, and so had a generation prepared to use it.

What I could not have predicted was that the deepest cultural shift would not come from prosperity. It would come from crisis.

The test

The judicial reform protest movement of 2023 became an unlikely rehearsal. For nine months, foundations and individual donors learned to fund civil society at speed, coordinate across organizational lines and mobilize the public. The networks and instincts built during that period had been tested before they were needed at scale.

When the Oct. 7 attacks came, they were ready. 

Brothers in Arms, which had built a civil society operation with tens of thousands of volunteers, redirected its entire network within days for logistics, communications, and community support. One Heart, one of Israel’s most experienced civilian emergency organizations, mobilized 50,000 volunteers across a network of situation rooms. The capacity was already there. The domestic upheaval followed by war activated it, and the entrepreneurial toolkit made the response possible. The crisis made it necessary.

A coalition reflex has emerged alongside MONGO, the “my own NGO” impulse that long defined Israeli giving and produced an unusually fragmented sector. The Jewish Funders Network now counts over 160 Israeli families in its membership and held its 2024 international conference in Tel Aviv. In the months following the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli First Lady Michal Herzog convened a coalition of major foundations and philanthropists from Israel and the United States to coordinate long-term rebuilding, with an explicit ambition not simply to restore what was lost, but to build something better. That philosophy has not been lost on Diaspora funders watching from overseas. As Israeli giving has grown, international donors increasingly treat Israeli buy-in as a signal of organizational credibility, something worth building before heading abroad to fundraise.

The corporate and institutional sides have matured in parallel. Total donations through the Maala ESG Index reached NIS 960 million ($320 million) in 2024, up from NIS 590 million ($196) in 2022. As Israel’s first generation of tech wealth begins handing off to its heirs, a family office ecosystem is taking shape with philanthropic advisory at its core, professionalizing how the next chapter of Israeli giving will be planned and deployed.

The new founders

Israeli philosopher and author Micah Goodman writes in The Eighth Day that today’s Israelis see themselves as the new founders of the next version of Israel, carrying the spirit of the founding generation into a new moment. Looking at what Israeli philanthropy has built over the past decade, and especially what it built under fire, that framing feels precise.

Every generation of Israelis has been called to build. The halutzim (pioneers) built the land. Later generations built the institutions. This one is building the social infrastructure: the networks, the foundations, the culture of giving that will hold the country together for the generation that comes next. They are doing it not by importing a model wholesale, but by taking what they know, meeting a crisis and forging something distinctly their own.

Frayda Leibtag is a public affairs strategist based in Israel who has worked at the intersection of the private, public and nonprofit sectors.