Good Wednesday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we cover a new cash prize that aims to keep people in the Jewish nonprofit sector and feature an op-ed by Aleph’s Rabbi Darren Kleinberg on facing new challenges. Also in this newsletter: the Brandeis Center’s Ken Marcus, Pamela Paresky, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt and his predecessor, Abe Foxman, Heather McPherson, Tanya Shadoan, Rebecca Randall, Colette Avital and Rabbi ??Yisrael Meir Lau. We’ll start with a gala that paid tribute to a jarring change.

Annual dinners sometimes present an opportunity for an organization to announce a change in direction. But last night, at the gala dinner of the Tikva Children’s Home of Odessa, Ukraine, the script was flipped: The event marked how much the organization had changed over the past year — but it wasn’t a change Tikva had sought.

Instead, much of the event focused on how, in the early moments of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the Orthodox Jewish children’s home managed to evacuate approximately 1,000 children across the border with Romania — driving more than 1,000 miles through the night and even on Shabbat, often through harrowing and life-threatening circumstances.

“The decision to leave our home was difficult but obvious,” Tikva’s executive director, Arielle Setton, said in a speech at the gala. “The evacuation was treacherous, with so much unknown.”

The children’s home, which for more than two decades before the invasion had served as a residence and community for 300 children, and a school for three times that number, has fully reconstituted itself in Romania and now also acts as a humanitarian aid agency. Since the start of the war more than eight months ago, Tikva has evacuated more than 4,000 people from Ukraine and now provides meals and a home for more than 1,000 refugees in Romania, in addition to supporting several hundred in Ukraine.

The dinner, held in the Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, had the trappings of a gala — attendees in cocktail attire noshing on finger food before eating a catered dinner; a silent auction with prizes including a golf foursome plus lunch at a Trump country club and a dog leash by Stella McCartney; some musical accompaniment as the crowd dined. It raised about $1.5 million and recognized major donors including Oren Eisner and Stan Kleger. But reminders of the war were everywhere, from pictures of the evacuated children flashing on projection screens to the calls for donations that would feed families left with next to nothing.

The honoree of the night was real estate developer Russ Krivor, who was born in Odessa and emigrated with his family as a child in 1989.

“I thought it would be a beautiful family trip once a year, I’d write a check, I would meet the children,” Krivor said regarding his expectations of being a Tikva trustee. “I had no idea what our community would face in the year ahead… I felt a responsibility and I realized that our kids were most likely going to be in harm’s way. There are many children in Ukraine, but these I could at least do something about.”

Following scrutiny of its educational programs in Fox News, the Anti-Defamation League announced a four-person panel that would review the group’s curricular materials and anti-bias programs “to ensure engagement with ideologically diverse audiences and to maximize effectiveness of these initiatives.”

The Fox News story, published in September, said that the ADL’s materials “included concepts from critical race theory as well as far-left ideas within its education wing.” At the time, the ADL responded, “We do not teach Critical Race Theory, period.”

“These programs and related resources continue to be extremely effective, but as we grow and scale them it is important to ensure they are still meeting the mark and in line with our historic mission to fight antisemitism and hate,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. The group also announced that it would append a note to its book recommendations saying that it does not necessarily agree with the authors’ personal views. It also removed books by authors credibly accused of sexual harassment.

The panel includes diversity consultant Carol Fulp; Nealin Parker, executive director of Common Ground USA, a conflict resolution organization; and psychology scholar and academic freedom advocate Pamela Paresky. Most notably, it also includes Kenneth Marcus, assistant secretary of education for civil rights under former President Donald Trump. The ADL has been a frequent and fierce critic of Trump.

“It takes courage and character to reach out like this, admitting that you could use the assistance of sister organizations” in the Jewish world, Marcus, who founded the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which advocates for Jewish and pro-Israel college students, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “I don’t go into the program with preconceptions. ADL’s programs are both widely used and influential, so it’s important that they be well-crafted, bias-free and generally excellent.”

Paresky told eJP that “it speaks to the seriousness with which they take [their mission] that they are interested in hearing perspectives they might not get without looking outside the organization.”