Good Wednesday morning!

The Wayfarer Foundation is offering a $100,000 challenge grant to support the University of Haifa’s Laboratory for Religious Studies, which will host scholars and students interested in exploring different faiths as they manifest in the life of Israel’s third-largest city, known for its ethnic and religious diversity, a spokesman told eJewishPhilanthropy.

The matching grant comes after the foundation made a $50,000 grant to the university in June, announced by Steve Sarowitz, a board member and the founder of Paylocity, the human services and payroll company. Sarowitz is a member of the Baha’i faith, which is headquartered in Haifa in the Baha’i World Center. About 40% of the University of Haifa’s undergraduate population is Arab.

The university and the foundation envision the laboratory as the first iteration of a larger center for religious studies where scholars will conduct research, promote dialogue and engage with the public. Sarowitz, University of Haifa President Ron Robin, Rabbi Na’ama Dafni-Kellen, Archbishop Yousef Matta and Muslim leader Mu’ad Odeh will participate in an interfaith panel, “Mobilizing Change Through Inter-Religious Collaboration” on Dec. 2.

BY THE NUMBERS

Women and girls’ causes in Israel receive .9% of philanthropic funding

Courtesy

What is widely believed to be the first-ever study of philanthropic support for women and girls in Israel has found that groups exclusively serving that demographic receive less than 1% of all funds, and the majority of what is given goes to three legacy organizations whose mission is to serve women only indirectly by focusing on children’s issues. Because Israeli society is so diverse, many women and girls have needs that are specific to their religious or ethnic group and are not being met by the legacy groups, Kylie Eisman-Lifschitz, who initiated the study, told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff.

Capacity constraints: “What you see is a proliferation of nonprofits that have arisen to address these issues, and they’re all very underfunded,” she said. A 2018 report commissioned by the Dafna Fund, an Israeli feminist grant-maker, and the National Council of Jewish Women documented more than 100 Israeli organizations devoted exclusively to advancing women’s status or promoting gender equality by working on issues such as political representation, the wage gap, religious freedom and gender-based violence.

Research inspired by experience: Eisman-Lifschitz is the founder and principal of Workwell, a management consulting firm, and the board chair of Mavoi Satum, a women’s rights organization. It was her experience with Mavoi Satum that led her to realize the extent to which funding is limited for Israeli nonprofits that focus on women’s and girls’ issues. The study, sponsored by Workwell, was done in partnership with independent researchers and with Hebrew University’s Institute for the Study of Civil Society and Philanthropy in Israel. It analyzes publicly available budget data of nonprofits available through Guidestar and the Israeli charities bureau, known as the Registrar of Non-Profits.

A dearth of data: “I joined the research as we wanted to study in-depth the situation of giving with a gender lens in Israel. While there are studies about it in other countries, this issue has never been studied in Israel before,” said Professor Michal Almog Bar, head of the institute. Because the three legacy organizations — Emunah, a women’s Zionist organization; Na’amat, which has its roots in the Zionist Labor movement; and WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization) — receive 86% of philanthropic funding, very little is left over for other groups, which have average annual budgets of NIS 2 million, or about $600,000.

Read more here.

BRINGING ART AND HISTORY TO LIFE

Augmented reality: Elevating our stories, augmenting our lives

JArts Gallery

“My husband, Mike, likes to tell people that the first time I watched the ‘Facing the Flag’ vignette in the JArts Gallery augmented reality app there was a tear in my eye. This is notable because I am not one to cry, so even I was surprised by how much this piece, that brought 1930s Germany into my living room, moved me,” writes Laura Conrad Mandel, executive director of Boston’s Jewish Arts Collaborative, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Background: “Early in the pandemic, Mike and I were lamenting the fact that Hanukkah 2020 would not be the same without the annual JArts gathering at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For six years, this event had brought thousands of us together for Hanukkah, featuring art talks and performances throughout the galleries, a community candle lighting of a custom-commissioned art Hanukkiah, and an experimental virtual reality art installation. So, in thinking about how we could bring a bit of that evening’s magical feeling into our own home, we knew this was the moment to merge all our learnings from years of experimenting with virtual reality with our vision for using augmented reality, the ability to digitally overlay images onto our physical space. By adding these virtual elements, we can trick our brains into feeling more physically connected to an otherwise flat image.”

Read the full piece here.

ASKING FOR HELP

What do you do when things stop working?

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“I call myself an accidental Jewish professional. I volunteered at an organization, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and fell into a job there while still in college. Graduating in the middle of a financial crisis, I jumped at a full-time offer at the organization. It was there that my love of the Jewish nonprofit sector bloomed. It was also there where I learned that my organizational skills, quick turnaround time and trusty highlighters were a perfect fit for a career in operations,” writes Marisa Diehl, senior communications associate at Leading Edge, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

New job: “Such was the case three years ago when I was lucky enough to join the staff of Leading Edge, an organization with a mission I hold dear… But soon after I joined the team, things started to change. Suddenly I couldn’t remember things with the same clarity. Typos and missed details crept into my work. I had to reread instructions over and over before understanding what to do. Some people may not see this as a big deal, if that’s been their past experience, but that was never me before… Color-coded files, the ability to anticipate the needs of my team, these were not just things I happened to be good at, but things that made up the entire basis of my work identity. And now they weren’t working. I now needed to work twice as hard to do things that were half as efficient.”

Deepening problems: “But it didn’t stop there. I was getting sick. A lot. And each time, it would take me much longer to bounce back. I went to general physicians and specialists. Each gave me a different diagnosis and spun me into a tornado of unanswered questions. Enter the flaming dumpster of a year: 2020. Along with the small stressor of a global pandemic, I noticed even more cognitive issues. It was when I lost vision in my left eye that I realized something was seriously wrong. After about two years of searching for answers, I finally received a more certain diagnosis: Relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.”

Asking for help: “I needed to adapt, but had no idea where to start. I was overwhelmed, exhausted and terrified of losing my job… I am not one to ask for help; I’m the one folks go to when they need help. But my supervisor, who during this entire ordeal had been patient, empathetic and kind, went above and beyond to help me navigate this seemingly impossible terrain and pushed me to take care of myself.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Back On Track: In The New York Times, Robin Pogrebin reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has secured the lead donation — of $125 million, from trustee Oscar L. Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang — that will enable it to rebuild its wing for contemporary art, delayed since 2017 due to financial problems. Oscar L. Tang, the museum’s first Asian-American trustee, says that the new wing will house Leonard A. Lauder’s gift of Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures, in addition to a more inclusive modern collection. “The Met has a special opportunity to be much more global in the context of Modern and contemporary,” Tang said. “In the art field, there has been insufficient focus on this. We wanted to help the museum move in that direction, beyond the Western canon.” [NYTimes]

A New Pair Of Shoes: The National Museum of American Jewish History, which emerged from bankruptcy in mid-September, is now able to purchase its building, clear its construction debt and create an eight-figure endowment thanks to a gift from shoe mogul Stuart Weitzman, writes Stephan Salisbury in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The museum will now be named the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History after the entrepreneur, who is from Massachusetts and was attracted to the museum because of his interest in George Washington’s letter to the Jewish community of Newport, R.I., which the museum featured in a 2012 exhibition. The museum’s CEO, Misha Galperin, who first shared the news in an eJewishPhilanthropy post, could not disclose the amount of the gift but said it is “very significant and it deserves the name of … the museum. It really ensures our future.” [PhillyInquirer]

Pic of the Day

Shavei Israel

Jerusalem-based Shavei Israel designed and produced hundreds of dreidels with Mandarin lettering for the Jews of Kaifeng, China. The dreidels are believed to be the first ones made incorporating Chinese characters.