Your Daily Phil: Conservative rabbis further welcome interfaith families — but still not weddings
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In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we speak with Rabbi David Stav, the chair of the moderate religious Zionist group Tzohar, about the divisions in Israel around religion-and-state issues. We report on the Conservative movement’s new rulings welcoming interfaith families while stopping short of having rabbis officiate their weddings, and on the low rate of approvals for federal nonprofit security grants. We feature an opinion piece by Cathy Lawi drawing attention to a gap in mental health funding in Israel, while a piece by Rabbi Nico Socolovsky focuses on the need for culturally competent mental health resources tailored to the American Jewish community. Also in this issue: Daniel R. Weiss, Andrew Gross and Frances “Fran” Belzberg.
Today’s Your Daily Phil was curated by eJP Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross, Opinion Editor Rachel Kohn and Israel Editor Justin Hayet. Have a tip? Email us here.
What We’re Watching
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is co-hosting an antisemitism roundtable with the Anti-Defamation League to hear from Jewish community leaders about recent antisemitic incidents in the state.
What You Should Know
Among all of the other divisions and disagreements working their way through the global Jewish community, there is one that is, perhaps, less understood but whose outcome may have a tremendous impact on Israel-Diaspora relations. And that is the rift within Israel’s dati-leumi, or national-religious, community, a comparatively small portion of the Israeli public, and yet one with the potential power to reshape the country’s politics and its relationship with religion — and therefore with Diaspora Jewry.
The community has long been split. There is a more moderate faction that strives to serve as the so-called “connecting hyphen,” bridging the secular “national” world and the “religious” world. And there is a hard-line faction that brings religious fervor to nationalism, often referred to by the Hebrew portmanteau hardali, joining Haredi and leumi.
Last week, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross sat down with Rabbi David Stav, the chairman of Tzohar, a growing movement representing that more moderate faction, to discuss the future of the organization, his hopes for reforming Israel’s religious establishment and what non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews should understand about the country’s relationship with Judaism.
News
RABBINIC RULINGS
Conservative rabbis further welcome interfaith families — but keep weddings off the table
Eight months after the Conservative movement apologized to interfaith couples for treating them as if their relationships were a threat to Jewish survival, the rabbinic arm of the movement announced a new set of Jewish legal rulings to provide concrete ways congregations and rabbis can better welcome interfaith families. The reforms, however, stop short of allowing Conservative rabbis officiate at interfaith weddings, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher reports.
New target audience: The goals of the changes announced in the publication titled “Gateways Into Jewish Living: Guiding the Conservative/Masorti Rabbi in Supporting Families with Non-Jewish Loved Ones” are “inspiring observance of mitzvot, inspiring study of Torah, inspiring people to seek God,” Rabbi Pamela Barmash, a co-editor, told eJP. Previously, the movement looked to households with two Jewish parents to attain these goals. “Our focus now is really on inspiring couples and families who are intermarried to live a Jewish life, to maintain an exclusively Jewish home, and if they have children, to raise Jewish children,” she said.
SECURITY CONCERN
FEMA approves only 27% of 2025 Nonprofit Security Grant applications
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced on Wednesday that 1,600 out of 6,000 applications received for the long-delayed 2025 Nonprofit Security Grant Program cycle were approved, meaning that less than 27% of organizations that applied received any funding — a significant dip from previous years, reports Marc Rod for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.
Details: The grants were approved nearly a year after applications opened for the 2025 cycle on Aug. 13, 2025, and after applications for 2026 NSGP funding were already due last week. FEMA indicated that state agencies responsible for administering the grants on the state level and repeated Department of Homeland Security shutdowns relating to immigration enforcement disputes were responsible for the delays.
Opinion
TICKING CLOCK
We’re overlooking the mental health warning signs in Israel at our peril
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Cathy Lawi, CEO of EmotionAid, writes that while the majority of public mental health resources in Israel are devoted to treating people who have already developed significant psychological conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, the fact that an even greater number of Israeli adults and children are living with sub-clinical symptoms demands investment now.
“Some of them will recover on their own, but many will not — not because their distress is inevitable, but because nothing is currently designed to catch them before it worsens. Here is the uncomfortable math the Israeli government and funders need to sit with: it is dramatically cheaper, faster and more effective to help someone with moderate symptoms build resilience and cope than it is to treat that same person two years later once their symptoms have calcified into full-blown PTSD.”
GOOD MEDICINE
The empty shelf we should have noticed
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Rabbi Nico Socolovsky, co-editor of the Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Jewish American Youth (Springer, 2026), argues that successful integration need not come at the cost of acknowledging and embracing our cultural distinctiveness.
“The goal isn’t to pull Jews away from the larger society, or to reduce Jewish identity to vulnerability, or to let antisemitism become the only lens through which our young people are understood. The goal is a fuller, more accurate description of who we are: an American Jewish community that is profoundly integrated and yet meaningfully distinctive.”
Worthy Reads
Balcony View: In The Times of Israel, Daniel R. Weiss, head of school at the Bornblum Jewish Community School in Memphis, Tenn., reflects on how adaptive leadership taught him to lead from the “balcony.” “From the balcony, a school stops looking like a building with a budget and starts looking like what it actually is: a web of relationships, held together by a common belief that our children are worth this much care.”
Built to Last: In Stanford Social Innovation Review, Talia Milgrom-Elcott and Justin D’Angona argue that enduring philanthropic impact no longer requires Carnegie-style permanence and offer a five-part test for gifts built to outlast the donor. “Durability without independence is an Ozymandias, crumbling the moment a donor’s attention moves on. A catalytic spark without transferability smolders out with its initial gift. Endurance results from the compound effect of these elements.”
The Pay to Stay: In The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Rasheeda Childress writes that nonprofit leaders who raised staff pay say charities can afford it by treating wages as mission-critical, tracking turnover costs, winning board and staff buy-in and phasing raises over years. “You can’t expect people to work themselves to death wearing 50 different hats and working 65 to 80 hours a week and expect your organization to thrive.”
A Village’s Story: In The Forward, Benyamin Cohen traces how an Illinois farmer’s inherited Holocaust story widened from private family memory into a village’s shared inheritance, following Nik Jakobs to the Dutch town that saved his grandmother. “He came thinking the story belonged to his family. He left knowing it belonged to a village.”
Major Gifts
Santa Barbara, Calif., philanthropist Cheryl Goldberg has donated $6 million to the Lompoc Theatre Project, the largest private gift in the nonprofit’s history…
Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, plans to commit one-third of his roughly $35 billion fortune to his foundation under a succession plan focused on health and education…
Nine funders including Google, JPMorganChase and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation launched the Anti-Scams Philanthropy Collaborative, pledging more than $50 million to fight a global scam economy estimated at $442 billion a year…
Correction: Yesterday’s edition of Your Daily Phil incorrectly identified one of the donors of a $1 million gift to Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan; her name is Paula J. Omansky.
Transitions
Chicago’s Jewish Council on Urban Affairs named Anna Rubin as its next executive director…
Ellen Alper is stepping down from her role as a CEO of National Council of Jewish Women St. Louis after a 23-year run…
Andrew Gross is joining the American Jewish Committee’s New York office as its director…
Monnique Faison started an additional three-year term as a member of the board of directors on the National Council of Jewish Women…
Allan Golston is leaving his role at the Gates Foundation as president of U.S. programs…
Word on the Street
Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman examines how New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has attempted to govern the city without maintaining relationships with traditional Jewish groups…
Opposition lawmakers in Israel filibustered an 11-hour Knesset Finance Committee session yesterday to block NIS 392 million ($127 million) for Haredi education and West Bank settlements…
A newly released Candid and Association of Black Foundation Executives report found that major foundations’ giving to historically Black colleges and universities fell from $65 million to $45 million over nearly two decades, leaving the average Ivy League school with 178 times more foundation funding than the average HBCU…
Jerusalem’s Beit Avi Chai has signed a multiyear deal with Berlin’s Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz to produce a German season of its series “Let Objects Speak,” featuring Jewish artifacts from the foundation’s state museums and libraries…
The Nico Gunzburg Foundation has sued Belgian rail operator SNCB and the state over 28 wartime convoys that carried some 25,000 Jews and hundreds of Roma and Sinti from Mechelen to Auschwitz…
U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham visited northwest London’s Jewish Care social services nonprofit, hailing it as the “gold standard” in care …
Jewish summer campers headed home to Baltimore piled out of the vehicle they were traveling in during Tuesday night’s storms to haul a fallen tree off a Washington road, clearing the way for a blocked ambulance in what one camper called achdus, or togetherness…
Israel’s Registrar of Nonprofits asked a Tel Aviv court to dissolve Israeli nonprofit Chance for a Drop of Happiness, alleging operator German Zuirman recruited paid stand-ins and used donation boxes falsely claiming to fund children’s cancer care…
A Brooklyn federal judge sentenced Dan Sohail to serve six months in jail and $19,000 in restitution for ramming his car into Chabad’s world headquarters in January…
Robert J. Miron, a cable television pioneer who helped build the Newhouse Broadcasting Corp., died July 29 at 89…
Frances “Fran” Belzberg, a Vancouver philanthropist and Order of Canada recipient whose family founded Israel’s OneFamily terror-victims organization, died last Shabbat at 99…
Pic of the Day
Foundation for Jewish Camp CEO Jamie Simon and Combined Jewish Philanthropies President and CEO Rabbi Marc Baker speak on Monday at a reception in Boston celebrating FJC’s New England chapter at Gann Academy Beit Midrash in Waltham, Mass.
The event was held during FJC’s board retreat and drew roughly 100 representatives of local Jewish organizations, including the Kaplan Foundation, Krupp Family Foundation and JCC Greater Boston.
Birthdays
Ken Olin, actor, director and producer, turns 72
Allan Huber “Bud” Selig, commissioner emeritus of Major League Baseball, his 2019 memoir is For the Good of the Game, turns 92
Ronald E. Stackler, retired attorney from the firm of Hatton, Petrie & Stackler in Aliso Viejo, Calif., turns 89
Lindsey Miller-Lerman, the first woman justice on the Nebraska Supreme Court, as a teen she won two gold medals and a silver medal as a swimmer at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, turns 79
Lev Leviev, philanthropist and investor, of Uzbek Bukhari background, known as the “King of Diamonds,” turns 70
David Kahn, sports executive, attorney and president of Paris Basketball, turns 65
Tali Ploskov, former mayor of Arad and then a member of the Knesset for the Kulanu and Likud parties, turns 64
Michael S. Glassner, president of C&M Transcontinental, he served as COO for the first two Trump campaigns, turns 63
Lisa Kudrow, Emmy Award-winning actor, comedian and producer, turns 63
Howard Endelman, head coach of men’s tennis and director of tennis operations at Columbia University, turns 61
Rich Cohen, best-selling nonfiction author, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines, he is a co-creator of the HBO series “Vinyl,” turns 58
Robert M. Gottheim, district chief of staff for retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), turns 55
Jonathan Seth Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust at the DOJ during most of the Biden administration, turns 53
Isaac Lidsky, motivational speaker, author and entrepreneur, he served as a law clerk in 2008 for Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg, the first blind person to clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court, turns 47
Rebecca M. Kutler, president of MS NOW
Limor Son Har-Melech, member of the Knesset for the Otzma Yehudit party, turns 47
Avishay Artsy, senior producer at Vox and host and producer of the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies
Eric Chaim Axel, president and founder in 2014 of Dallas-based ECA Strategies
Lewis Sohinki, Pittsburgh-based therapist
Sarah Tuttle-Singer, author of Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered: One Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem, turns 45
Jonas Herzberg Karpantschof, former director of policy and public affairs for the Jewish Community of Denmark, now in the renewable energy and offshore wind industry
Elizabeth Barcohana, attorney and member of the Los Angeles County GOP Central Committee for Assembly District 42, which includes Pacific Palisades, turns 43
Tamar Schwarzbard, former head of digital operations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel
Samuel Ezra Eshaghoff, managing principal of West Egg Development, a New York-based real estate development firm, turns 34
Joshua Weintraub, former trade officer at Israel’s economic mission to the South and Midwest U.S.
Mor Maman, winner of the Miss Israel pageant in 2014, she is now an international businesswoman, turns 31
Joey Lynn King, actor, as a 10-year-old she starred in the comedy film “Ramona and Beezus,” and since then in many movies and television shows, turns 27
