Your Daily Phil: Boarding school: New $1.1M initiative aims to train lay leaders
Add EJP on GoogleGood Friday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on an ambitious new program aiming to train 5% of all Jewish nonprofit board members, on the merger of two Philadelphia-area Jewish day schools and on a forthcoming book about Chabad Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed in the Bondi Beach terror attack. We conclude Black History Month with a piece by Dan Osborn drawing lessons for the Jewish community from the evolution of Black representation in social studies curricula, and wrap up Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month with an opinion piece by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi about “the next phase” of disability inclusion. Also in this newsletter: Dov Maimon, Noah Efron and Jonathan Gray.
Shabbat shalom!
What We’re Watching
We are keeping an eye on developments in the Middle East as President Donald Trump considers a military strike on Iran. The USS Gerald Ford is arriving in Israel today as the U.S. continues its force buildup in the region. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem has also announced voluntary departures for non-emergency embassy staff and families of staffers, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told anyone considering leaving Israel to do so today.
J Street’s annual convention kicks off in Washington tomorrow evening. Its Sunday plenary will feature remarks by the heads of the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements. Additional speakers include American and Israeli politicians, civil society leaders and journalists.
The National Building Museum is opening a new exhibition tomorrow focused on the Rosenwald Schools across the American South, which were funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and created in partnership with Booker T. Washington.
The inaugural New York Jewish Teen Summit kicks off on Sunday in New York City, bringing together more than 200 teens from the New York metropolitan area for discussions on “Jewish leadership, belonging and community-building.”
What You Should Know
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus knew the keys to success: the folks in the orange aprons.
“Bernie always believed in talents,” Yoni Kaiser-Blueth, program director of the Jewish portfolio at The Marcus Foundation, told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher. “If you just look at what Bernie built at the Home Depot, the secret sauce is understanding that leadership drives culture.” Marcus “invested in the associates” — the orange-aproned folks — “and then everything else stemmed and fell from that.”
With this in mind, The Marcus Foundation has partnered with Leading Edge to launch the Board Leadership Accelerator, a $1.1 million program running from 2026-2028 that will train over 1,500 board members from over 60 Jewish nonprofits. In total, the initiative will assist 5% of the estimated 30,000 Jewish nonprofit board members nationwide.
“In the Jewish organizational world, a lot of our focus tends to be on elevating professional leadership, and it’s missing a huge ingredient: There needs to be healthy boards,” Kaiser-Blueth said. “That creates a symbiotic relationship. When organizations are functioning at their best, [the organization’s] director, professional staff and boards are working in real partnership.”
After piloting a smaller version of the Board Leadership Accelerator last year, which focused on JCC and federation boards, Gali Cooks, president and CEO of Leading Edge, recognized the demand for a larger program and pitched the idea to The Marcus Foundation. “Now is the time to support these leaders,” she said to the foundation, and it jumped to help.
Originally, Leading Edge aimed to recruit 50 organizations to participate in the program, but the demand was so great that it is now serving 63. Every board member gives “your time, your treasure, your talent,” Cooks said. “Any one of those is a gift, so let us get you ready.”
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
Two leading Philadelphia Jewish day schools announce ‘unification’
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy and Perelman Jewish Day School, two leading Philadelphia-area Jewish day schools, will merge to create a single pre-K-12 pluralistic community school in time for the start of the 2027-2028 school year, the organizations shared with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Nira Dayanim. The two schools are located a couple of miles apart, with JBHA in Bryn Mawr and Perelman at facilities in Wynnewood and Melrose Park. JBHA runs from sixth through 12th grade, while Perelman is a pre-K-5 school. The unified school, yet to be named, will become the only community day school in the Greater Philadelphia area.
Better together: According to Rabbi Marshall Lesack, who currently serves as JBHA’s head of school and will lead the unified school, discussions about merging the two schools started two years ago. “We are both strong independently, and I think that we will be stronger together,” Lesack told eJP. “We’re also excited and committed to bringing more students into the Jewish day school system and keeping more students in the Jewish day school system, and we think that we can do that even greater and more impactfully as a single pre-K-12.”
BOOKSHELF
New book to share wisdom of Chabad rabbi killed in Bondi Beach terror attack
forthcoming book offers insights into the spiritual advice Chabad Rabbi Eli Schlanger — who was killed in the Bondi Beach Hanukkah terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia in December — imparted to a secular Jewish woman during her own near-death experience. In September 2022, Nikki Goldstein lay comatose, fighting for her life in a Sydney hospital. Her daughter spotted Schlanger, the Chabad emissary to Bondi, in the ICU halls and Goldstein’s husband desperately requested he pray for her. Schlanger blew the shofar beside her hospital bed and prayed for her recovery. One day later, Goldstein began recuperating from a life-threatening infection, reports Haley Cohen for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.
Lasting legacy: As Goldstein, a best-selling author of more than a dozen books, regained her health, her bond with Schlanger grew and the duo decided to co-author a book. In January 2025, they began recording their conversations. Conversations With My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World will be published in May — allowing Schlanger’s legacy to live on after he and 14 others were killed in December in a targeted terror attack on Sydney’s Jewish community.
Read the full report here and sign up for Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff here.
FOLLOW THEIR LEAD
What Jewish representation in textbooks can learn from Black history education
“When the history of persecution is the primary, if not only, formal educational context in which students encounter Jewish representation, those of us who produce curricula, work with teachers and educate students are arresting the potential of Jewish representation in the classroom,” writes Dan Osborn, executive director of Project Mosaics, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “We’re also formulating our approaches to education and Jewish representation in curriculum in ways that are out of touch with the current realities of social studies education.”
Update the framework: “In recent years, I’ve been deeply inspired by the work of Black scholars who are formulating innovative approaches to bringing Black history into classrooms in ways that are multifaceted, complex and, importantly, deeply grounded in humanity. LaGarrett J. King of the University of Buffalo has spent years developing a Teaching Black History Framework. … The need to expand and improve the representation of Jewish people in schools is too important for those of us invested in this work to simply double down on what we’ve done in the past. We need to create new vehicles for teaching and learning and tap into new sources of inspiration. A new framework must emphasize Jewish agency and include a multitude of Jewish voices, showcase and demonstrate Jewish creativity and contributions to world history and provide students with opportunities to learn about Jewish values.”
JDAIM 2026
From intention to expectation: The next phase of Jewish disability inclusion
“In 2012, a small group of Jewish philanthropists and foundations began asking a simple but transformative question: What would it take for people with disabilities to be fully included in Jewish life?” writes Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, co-founder of the Mizrahi Family Charitable Fund, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “A group of people active in Jewish philanthropy who had found that their families were not welcome in Jewish life due to disability access issues connected through the Jewish Funders Network. Together, they helped bring disability inclusion into the philanthropic spotlight, and other philanthropists joined as allies.”
Looking back, looking ahead: “The wave of disability inclusion in the early 2010s was driven by visionary funders, champions and superstar advocates with disabilities such as Liz Weintraub and Matan Koch. In many institutions, however, inclusion was not fully embedded into systems, budgets and accountability structures. As Jewish organizations faced security threats, rising antisemitism and other urgent priorities, disability inclusion often slipped to the periphery of the agenda. Yet disability intersects with aging, mental health, workforce participation and community belonging. It is not a niche issue. It is central to our future.”
Worthy Reads
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: In Fathom, Dov Maimon considers the impossible choice facing European Jewry, between liberal societies that struggle to protect them and authoritarian ones that only do so contingently. “It is tempting to declare that ‘liberalism has failed.’ That is too sweeping – because Europe is not one legal system, one political culture, or one pattern of enforcement. What is true, however, is that in some liberal societies the interaction of law, institutions, and cultural hesitation can produce outcomes that Jews experience as abandonment. … We cannot trust illiberal regimes to protect Jews in the long term. Their commitments shift. The prejudices they suppress rather than confront remain available for political mobilisation. Today’s friend may be tomorrow’s oppressor. But we also cannot continue to pretend that liberal democracies are fulfilling their promise when Jewish life is increasingly governed by calculation, guardedness, and fear – at least in countries where intimidation has become routine and enforcement feels inconsistent. … The tragedy is the choice itself: between systems that protect contingently and systems that, in some contexts, struggle to protect consistently.” [Fathom]
Coming Back: In The Times of Israel, Noah Efron reflects on the shloshim of Ran Gvili, the 30th day since the funeral of the last Israeli hostage returned from Gaza. “[Maimonides] suggests that for those first 30 days, the ordinary and the joyful alike are out of reach – haircuts and fresh shirts, love and laughter. It is only when 30 days have passed that they start to come back. … Which makes today, I think, as close to an end of the war in Gaza as we are going to get. … Today, on Ran Gvili’s shloshim, you can feel it. We are getting up, going to work, living our lives. This is such hope as we have, poised to spread to our dreams, our prayers, and our aspirations to mend the world.” [TOI]
Toiling in Torah: In the latest issue of Sapir, Shuki Taylor reflects on how we relate to Jewish learning and practice today. “Anthropologists of ritual note that physical participation creates ‘muscle memory’ of meaning. The act of kneading challah, fastening a mezuzah, or chanting Torah aloud does more than symbolize an idea?—?it anchors that idea in sensory experience, making it retrievable in ways that words alone cannot achieve. When we outsource these acts, we risk turning a lived tradition into an observed one, exchanging participation for consumption. This erosion reflects two converging trends in contemporary Western life that strike at Judaism’s foundational logic.” [Sapir]
Bringing the Community In: In The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Drew Lindsay reports on foundations constructing “mixed-use campuses” that serve as both a home for a funder’s operations and community gathering or even living space. “[T]he Cleveland Foundation is using its recently built headquarters and campus to create what academics call ‘third spaces’ — places where neighbors can gather to do everything from drink a beer to build their community’s future. The foundation’s office building, which opened in Hough[, Ohio,] in 2023, feels more like a community center than a $4 billion philanthropy. … ‘We felt we needed to be more warm and welcoming, more open and transparent,’ says CEO Lillian Kuri, a former chair of the Cleveland Planning Commission who holds a master’s in urban design. In the grant maker’s old space — leased space in a downtown high-rise — ‘it felt like philanthropy happened behind a curtain.’” [ChronicleofPhilanthropy]
Word on the Street
The Reform and Conservative movements, along with other Jewish organizations, are launching advocacy campaigns against a bill that passed its initial reading in the Knesset that would criminalize egalitarian prayer and other practices that go against the Chief Rabbinate’s rulings at the Western Wall and other holy sites…
The Forward’s Louis Keene reports that American Jewish University’s Ziegler Rabbinical School has halted admissions for next year; this comes weeks after AJU announced plans to overhaul the school…
Blackstone COO Jonathan Gray visited Tel Aviv University’s medical school last week — where he and his wife, Mindy, donated $125 million last year — saying afterward that he “loved the optimism, loved the striving” that he saw at the faculty…
The Knesset approved legislation exempting new immigrants to Israel who are self-employed and pay Social Security from paying into Israel’s social security system during their first five years in the country…
The Times of Israel interviews Canadian real estate mogul Hershey Friedman about his big bet on the Israeli housing market…
Sal Khan, founder of the digital learning platform Khan Academy, is developing a new alternative for traditional higher education…
Netflix dropped its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount raised its bid to $31 per share in an all-cash agreement…
Religion News Service spotlights two new Washington-area synagogues that are led by and geared toward Black Jews, Ohel Eidot Chemdat’a and Kehillat Sankofa…
Vandals defaced a statue of Winston Churchill in London, writing “Zionist war criminal,” on it with red paint…
Transitions
Dariusz Stola has been brought back as the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which he led from its founding in 2014 until he was pushed out of the role in 2019 following a dispute with the then-ruling party, the nationalist Law and Justice party…
Pic of the Day
Michael Shapira, a junior at Satellite Beach High School in Florida, receives an award last weekend at the Chabad youth movement CTeen’s International Summit in New York City, which honored him for withdrawing from a swimming competition because it conflicted with Shabbat.
“I trained five years for that race,” Shapira said in a video that was shown at the conference. “But this isn’t about what I want. It’s about who I am.”
Birthdays
Former New York Times op-ed columnist, he is a 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman turns 73 on Saturday…
FRIDAY: Performance artist and filmmaker, she is a professor emerita at UCSD, Eleanor Antin turns 91… Investor and trader, founder and chairman of CAM Capital, he is the chair of Juilliard, vice chair of Lincoln Center and on the board of the Metropolitan Opera, Bruce Kovner turns 81… Haverford, Pa.-based attorney, mediator and arbitrator, Judith Meyer… NYC-based real estate developer, Michael Gervis… Professor of physics at MIT, Alan Harvey Guth turns 79… Member of the British House of Lords, she is a retired rabbi and the chair of University College London Hospitals, Baroness Julia Neuberger turns 76… Historian, syndicated columnist, investigative journalist and talk show host, Edwin Black turns 76… U.S. senator (D-NH), Maggie Hassan turns 68… Stand-up comedian, Wendy Liebman turns 65… Suzanne “Suzy” Appelbaum… Writer and producer for television and film, David Krinsky turns 63… President and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford, David S. Waren… Film and television actor, he starred as FBI Agent Stan Beeman on the FX series “The Americans,” Noah Emmerich turns 61… Founder of Spanx, an intimate apparel company, she is a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks, Sara Blakely turns 55… Founder and executive director of Toldot Yisrael, Aryeh Halivni turns 53… Director of Georgetown University’s journalism program, Rebecca Sinderbrand… Singer-songwriter, composer and prayer leader, Sam Benjamin “Shir Yaakov” Feinstein-Feit turns 48… Finance minister of Israel, he is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, Bezalel Smotrich turns 46… President of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chaim Bloom turns 43… Senior counsel at WilmerHale, he is a former Obama White House aide where he was one of the originators of the White House Seder, Eric P. Lesser turns 41… Senior segment producer for “The Late Show with Steven Colbert” (and host of Chabad West Village’s “Hineni: Here I Am” speaker series), Neil Goldman… Video journalist for The Daily Wire, she completed her seven-year conversion process to Judaism in 2023, Kassy Dillon, now known as Kassy Akiva, turns 30… Alana Berkowitz…
SATURDAY: Israeli jurist, she was the first woman to serve as president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch turns 84… Professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, Linda Preiss Rothschild turns 81… Retired executive director of the Montreal chapter of ORT, Emmanuel Kalles… Actress and singer, Ilene Susan Graff turns 77… State Department antisemitism envoy during the second Obama administration, now a visiting professor at Georgetown, Ira Niles Forman turns 74… Professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, he is the brother of ZOA President Morton Klein. Dr. Samuel Klein turns 73… Founding engineer and a large shareholder of Facebook, Jeffrey Jackiel Rothschild turns 72… Greensboro, N.C., businessman, he is a past chairman of Hillel International, Randall Kaplan… Self-described as “America’s most notorious lobbyist,” at the center of an investigation that led to 21 convictions, Jack Abramoff turns 67… President of The New York Public Library since 2011, Anthony W. Marx turns 67… Editor-at-large of The Jewish Week, Andrew Silow-Carroll turns 65… Owner of a commercial lavender farm in New Jersey, she served as a member of the New Jersey state Senate until 2008, Ellen Karcher turns 62… Jerusalem-born businessman, he started and sold several companies in the automotive field, Mordechai “Moti” Kahana turns 58… President and CEO of The New York Times Company, Meredith Kopit Levien turns 55… Political commentator, Peter Beinart turns 55… Former member of the Knesset for the Blue and White party, Ruth Wasserman Lande turns 50… Former mayor of Jersey City, N.J., now head of the Partnership for New York City, Steven Fulop turns 49… National political correspondent for The New York Times covering campaigns, elections and political power, Lisa Lerer… Former professional ice hockey goaltender, he played for 10 years in North America and Europe, Dov Grumet-Morris turns 44… Head of analysis and insights at Prologue, Erica Goldman… Partner in the Los Angeles office of Davis Wright Tremaine, Adam Sieff… Director of international innovation and partnerships at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, Andrew H. Gross turns 37… Director of digital assurance and transparency at PwC, Li-Dor David… Israeli national fencing champion and fashion model, she represented Israel at Miss Universe 2015, Avigail Alfatov turns 30…
FEB. 29: Executive director of AIPAC from 1980 through 1993, Thomas A. Dine turns 86… French fashion photographer featured on the reality television series “America’s Next Top Model,” Gilles Bensimon turns 82… Polish-born economist and professor at New York University, Roman Frydman turns 78… Professor at Columbia Business School, she is a former board chair at Jewish Theological Seminary, Abby Joseph Cohen turns 74… Former member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Paul D. Rosenthal turns 66… Co-founder of Biebelberg & Martin in Millburn, NJ, he was previously the chair of the Golda Och Academy in West Orange, Keith N. Biebelberg… Professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, Joshua Berman turns 62… Denver-based attorney at Recht Kornfeld, Richard K. Kornfeld… Born in Kyiv, former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk known for his eponymous legal blog “The Volokh Conspiracy,” Eugene Volokh turns 58… Israeli mountain climber, search and rescue professional, best known for his heroic rescue of an unconscious Turk he found near the summit of Mount Everest in 2012, Nadav Ben Yehuda turns 38… Political operations project manager at AIPAC, Samantha Friedman Fallon…
SUNDAY: President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in NYC since 2001, he served for 30 years on the Los Angeles City Council, Joel Wachs turns 87… Real estate developer, Tulane’s basketball arena is named in his honor, Avron B. Fogelman turns 86… Professor emeritus of Jewish studies at Los Angeles Valley College and the former editor of Shofar, a peer-reviewed academic journal of Jewish studies, Zev Garber turns 85… CEO of Mandalay Entertainment and a co-owner of both the LA Dodgers and Golden State Warriors, Peter Guber turns 84… Former chairman and CEO of IBM until 2002, Lou Gerstner turns 84… Former member of the Knesset for the Likud and then the New Hope party, he is a son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Ze’ev Binyamin “Benny” Begin turns 83… Librarian at the Anti-Defamation League’s New York City headquarters, Marianne Benjamin… Israeli historian, author and journalist, he earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in the 1970s, Tom Segev turns 81… Israeli journalist, author, television personality and political commentator, Ehud Yaari turns 81… Industrialist, magazine publisher, film producer and art collector, Peter M. Brant turns 79… Cantor emeritus at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus / Congregation Beth Tikvah, Sam Weiss… U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) turns 75… Former executive of Viacom and longtime associate of the company’s former Chairman Sumner Redstone, Philippe Dauman turns 72… Previous president of Emory University, he is the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, Gregory L. Fenves turns 69… Author and former U.S. military intelligence officer, she is now a human rights activist focused on Eastern Europe, Nina Willner turns 65… Chairman and president of Berexco, an oil and gas firm based in Wichita, Kan., Adam E. Beren… Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist, Andrey Adamovskiy turns 64… Satirist, novelist, short story writer and journalist, he is also a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion, Neal Pollack turns 56… Television writer, director and producer, he is best known for co-creating the comedy-drama “Glee,” Brad Falchuk turns 55… AVP of corporate and community relations at Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute, Dara Schapiro Schnee… Six-time Emmy award-winning television journalist, he now works for CBS News, Dave Malkoff turns 50… Founder and principal at narrative/change, a Philadelphia-based media and communications firm, Jonathan Lipman… Israeli journalist and the former chairman of the Union of Journalists in Israel, Yair Tarchitsky turns 46… Principal at Mosaic Realty Partners and board member of both The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore and the Orthodox Union, Isaac Pretter… CEO of eToro, one of the world’s largest social investment networks, Yoni Assia… Former member of the U.S. national soccer team, now head of international recruitment and development at Atlanta United FC, Jonathan Spector turns 40… Co-founder of Roebling, Joshua Lachter… Senior political data reporter and the host of the “Margins of Error” podcast (both for CNN), Harry Enten turns 38… Litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Hannah Klain turns 35… Shortstop for Team Israel in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, now playing for the New York Boulders of the Frontier League, Assaf Lowengart turns 28… Kevin Golden…
