Your Daily Phil: Mandel Foundation boosts rabbinic pipeline with $1M grant
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In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we interview Keshet’s newest board member, Israeli tech philanthropist Alon Arvatz. We report on the Mandel Foundation’s $1 million gift to Atra to strengthen the American rabbinate, and on Shoham Nicolet being appointed the next president of the Adelson Family Foundation. We feature an opinion piece by Jeffrey M. Solomon on investing in outcomes you might not be around to see, and a piece by Susan Weinberg about Jewish family histories as an inroad to engagement. Also in this issue: Rabbi Adam Ferziger, Abigail Black Elbaum and Ronald Lauder.
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
It’s primary day in Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, Virginia and Washington state.
The Israel on Campus Coalition’s annual National Leadership Summit concludes this afternoon in Washington.
3GNY, an organization of descendants of Holocaust survivors, will host its second annual Evening Under the Stars benefit this evening at the Moise Safra Center in New York, honoring co-founder Leora Klein along with the Wladis family.
Aid L’Shalom, a nonprofit supporting cancer patients, will host a summer soiree this evening in Monsey featuring motivational speaker Gedale Fenster and singer Joey Newcomb with Tobi Rubinstein as master of ceremonies.
What You Should Know
In a bustling WeWork alongside the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv, where his AI startup is based, Alon Arvatz looks like a typical Tel Aviv techie in a casual polo, wedding ring, jeans and even a kippa. Yet he’s chasing something bigger than his next “exit” — the sale of a startup to a larger firm. Having recently joined the board of Keshet, Israel’s first donor-advised fund, Arvatz wants to spark a new culture of tech philanthropy in Israel.
In an interview this week, Arvatz told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Justin Hayet that his aim on the Keshet board is to “represent the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs.”
JH: How do you seek to bring more tech founders into the organized philanthropy world?
AA: First, there’s a place and a real opportunity for a conference for tech founders in Israel that doesn’t exist yet. … Second, everything needs to be much more user-friendly — the platforms and service providers, with a lot more AI involved in building reports and strategies for donors. And beyond that, we need to highlight the people already doing this.
News
MAJOR GIFTS
Mandel Foundation grants $1M over 3 years to Atra to improve rabbinate
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation is providing a $1 million, three-year grant to Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation to help train American rabbis, deepen their connections to one another and improve the rabbinate more generally, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher reports. This donation comes as more Jewish philanthropic foundations recognize the influence of rabbis on Jewish communities and the growing challenges facing them.
Starting early: “Rabbis need resources and support to serve effectively,” Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, executive director of Atra, told eJP. “Seminaries need to be training towards the needs of rabbis in the changing field. Organizations [that] hire, train, sustain, deploy rabbis need training and support to utilize their rabbis well. Funders need to know how they can invest so those investments can be useful. The research and the early investments have led to the possibility of bigger investments being effective.”
TRANSITIONS
Adelson Family Foundation taps former IAC CEO Shoham Nicolet as next president
The Adelson Family Foundation has appointed Shoham Nicolet, the former CEO of its grantee, the Israeli-American Council, as its next president, the foundation announced today. Nicolet will succeed Michael Bohnen, who has retired after 20 years in the role, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross reports.
Praise from the patriarch: “I am delighted to welcome Shoham to the foundation. We have worked together to expand and deepen the connection to Israel and Jewish identity in communities across the United States,” Dr. Miriam Adelson, a trustee of the foundation, said in a statement. “His leadership and vast experience will be invaluable as he leads the Foundation and advances its mission in the years ahead.”
Opinion
LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP
Every Jewish camp counselor is following Moses’ final lesson, and we should too
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Jeffrey M. Solomon, chair of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, reflects on a pivotal moment for Moses in the recent Torah portion of Va’etchanan and the model his response offers for Jewish leaders, from camp counselors to funders.
“Every summer, thousands of Jewish camp counselors do something extraordinary. Like Moses in the final days of his life, they devote themselves to preparing a generation whose greatest achievements they may never live to see.”
READER RESPONDS
Before we can speak with one voice, we must help more Jews discover theirs
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Susan Weinberg, president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, responds to Hadara Ishak’s call for “a coordinated Jewish strategy” for dealing with antisemitism with a proposal to help individuals with even the most tenuous links to the Jewish People connect with that part of their identity.
“When [people] uncover relatives who built communities, created businesses, served their countries or endured persecution, Jewish resilience and antisemitism cease to be abstractions. … It also reaches people whom traditional engagement often misses: interfaith families, adoptees, descendants of hidden Jews, younger adults skeptical of institutions and those whose Jewish identity has been obscured by assimilation or family silence.”
Worthy Reads
Runway to Redemption: In the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Andrew Silow-Carroll presents the Met’s plan to honor John Galliano as a test of teshuvah, laying out a rabbinic split over whether the designer’s repentance for his 2011 antisemitic rants is genuine. “Fifteen years after Galliano was fired as chief designer of Dior for praising Hitler and hurling antisemitic abuse at patrons in a Paris café, the fashion exhibition has become a test of what Judaism means by teshuvah — repentance — and whether genuine accountability can coexist with public redemption.”
Risky Business: In Bond, David Mattingly and Tom Barns argue that philanthropy must abandon safe bets and take bigger risks, funding grassroots movements and politically contentious causes as governments cut aid and squeeze civic space. “Not every investment will pay off. That is the reality of working in turbulent, uncertain times. But we will not emerge from the existential crises we face by making safe bets on the status quo.”
What’s in a Name?: In Masorti The New Journal of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Adam Ferziger reflects on his childhood flitting between the Orthodox and Conservative worlds in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, N.Y., and the porousness of religious denominations. “Ultimately, lived religion presents a far more complex picture than ideological positionality alone; it suggests that even after formal institutional boundaries have been seemingly concretized, a shared core engagement with religious principles and practice can sustain a sense of solidarity and mutuality.”
Major Gifts
Over 200 Taylor Swift fans packed 2,200 backpacks for students at a New York Cares event fueled by the $26 million donations made by Swift and Travis Kelce ahead of their wedding last month…
The city of Spokane, Washington, launched an online donation portal Sunday through its H.O.M.E. Starts Here Fund to direct wildfire relief to affected families and guard against scams…
Transitions
Word on the Street
The New York Times examines Ronald Lauder’s political giving, finding that Lauder, a longtime donor to GOP political efforts and candidates who in 2022 spent $13 million to boost GOP House candidates, has halted his giving to the party; one individual who spoke to the Times said the pivot stemmed from a decision made by the 82-year-old Lauder and his adult children to refocus on art and philanthropic projects. Read eJewishPhilanthropy’s recent interview with Lauder here…
New data from the NYPD shows that hate crimes — particularly against Jews — have spiked in New York City during the first seven months of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman reports…
Nonprofit groups, including religious institutions, requested more than $1.3 billion in funding from the Nonprofit Security Grant Program in 2025, around five times the $266 million that was ultimately available, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesperson told Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod…
CNBC reports that donations of private tech-company shares to donor-advised funds are surging as firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI soar in value, with noncash assets making up three-quarters of gifts to Schwab-affiliated DAFgiving360 over the past year…
A Tel Aviv University analysis of Central Bureau of Statistics data found that 90,922 Israelis left the country for three months or more in 2025, sustaining record emigration levels well above the annual average of about 60,000 in the previous decade…
Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav lost his $80 million bid for Mohawk Day Camp, the camp his kids attended, after hedge funders bid nearly $100 million amid the Shabsels bankruptcy…
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and entrepreneur Mark Cuban both say they’re “open to” Cuban buying a minority stake in the NFL team…
The Wall Street Journal spotlights efforts by Base Power, which recently closed a $1 billion funding round, and its cofounder Zach Dell, the son of tech founder and philanthropist Michael Dell, as the company looks to expand its footprint in the battery storage industry…
A New York man facing manslaughter charges in connection with a May hit-and-run in which Jewish journalist Cara Trager was killed was arraigned on hate crimes charges stemming from an incident that occurred weeks prior to the accident in which he repeatedly vandalized a kosher bagel shop that had Israeli flags on display…
The Wall Street Journal profiles Rabbi Yehuda Gerami, the chief rabbi of Iran, who leads the roughly 20,000-strong Jewish community in the Islamic Republic…
Visa bought Israeli fraud-detection company BioCatch for $2.4 billion…
Heroes To Heroes, a nonprofit founded by Judy Isaacson Elias to help American and IDF veterans heal from war, is shutting down…
Inside Philanthropy profiles how Jessica Seinfeld‘s Good+ Foundation grew from a 2001 baby-gear charity into a leading funder of fatherhood work…
Ilan Manes, 75, suffered a brain hemorrhage after assailants beat him on a bridge outside Jerusalem for trying to remove a banner demanding the release of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin; though the attack was caught on film, no arrests have yet been made…
Pic of the Day
An artist sculpts a unicorn out of sand yesterday as part of the “Dreams from Sand” festival on the beach in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa.
Birthdays
Marcia Riklis, immediate past board chair of the Jewish Funders Network
Dr. Ellen Wolf Schrecker, professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University and Stern College, she is an expert on the history of McCarthyism, turns 88
Rabbi Eliyahu Ben Haim, Talmudic scholar and a leader of New York’s Sephardic Jewish community, turns 86
Michael Salzberg, president at Salco Mechanical
Alfredo Goldschmidt, rabbi of Centro Israelita de Bogotá and chief rabbi of Colombia, turns 81
Frederic Lewis Bloch, former SVP and chief growth officer at the NYC HQ of the ADL, now a board member of the Jewish Democratic Council of America
Rabbi Yona Metzger, former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel who was convicted of fraud, turns 73
Sheldon Dan, retired professor in Memphis
Silvan Shalom, former longtime member of the Knesset for Likud including multiple ministerial positions, turns 68
Michael Gelman, executive producer of “Live with Kelly and Mark,” turns 65
Helen Lapkovsky, administrative manager at Edelman
Daniel Gross, global editorial director for PwC and editor-in-chief of PwC’s management magazine strategy+business, turns 59
Jonathan Miles Shecter, editor-in-chief of Cuepoint at Medium, he is known as Shecky Green, turns 58
Steven Rudin, Emmy Award-winning broadcast meteorologist at WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C.
Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, former Washington director of Bend the Arc Jewish Action
Audrey Azoulay, former director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, turns 54
Michael Schaffer, executive editor and host at City Cast
Andrei Cherny, chair of the Arizona Democratic Party from 2011 through 2012, he is a former White House speechwriter, turns 51
Caren Beth Auchman, VP of communications at Arctic Wolf
Randi Braun, CEO of Something Major, a leadership coaching and advisory firm, she is the author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work
Ben-Ari Boukai, director of corporate growth strategy in the geostrategic business group at EY-Parthenon
Jonathan Keyson, CRO and co-founder at Riverside[dot]fm
Greg Joseph, childhood student at the Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., he is a placekicker in the NFL, turns 32
Sabrina Plon Brier, TikToker, comedian and influencer, turns 32
Natalie Roberts
Evelyn Murphy
