The Latest From The Foundation

We’ve completed building our new facility, following a successful multi-million dollar capital campaign for the Ida Crown Jewish Academy, the premier coeducational modern Orthodox high school in the Midwest. As if that weren’t challenging enough, we now turn our attention to the challenge of bringing our educational experience in line with the challenges of the modern world. To adequately inspire our future students, it’s no longer sufficient to educate children in

Very quietly, and with little international attention, one of the most delicate and interesting engineering projects in the Middle East took a big step forward this month: the mutual Jordanian/Israeli Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Project was published to investors for the development and execution of the project’s first phase. The project includes a large desalination plant which will be built in Jordanian Aqaba, near Eilat, and will eventually result in

This past summer, the Boston area vegetarian restaurant chain Clover became certified kosher by Rabbi Barry Dolinger, an Orthodox rabbi in Providence, Rhode Island.  A controversy erupted, both because Rabbi Dolinger’s standards differ from many mainstream kashrut-certifying organizations and because a Clover employee mistakenly tweeted that the restaurant was under the supervision of the Rabbinical Council of New England.  Often such incidents have a tendency to turn political and nasty.

Israel has successfully branded itself as a “startup nation” but can it continue being one when only 20% of employees in its high-tech industry are women? Last winter, 40 senior executives from the Israeli civil service took part in the first class of the Wexner Senior Leadership (WSL) Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participating in this four-week program was an amazing experience: learning from the best teachers in the

I just started a blog a few days ago. The focus will be on investing in Israel — for profit and for idea — with stories ranging from investing in Israeli ventures, stocks, as well as in people, philanthropic projects and Israeli organizations. I want to explore all the various ways of investing in Israel’s present and future for my own selfish reasons, as someone for whom Israel’s strength and prosperity are

Jews plan to land a spacecraft on the moon. Sounds like an Ephraim Kishon satire, a Mel Brooks screenplay or perhaps a Sholem Aleichem short story that could have been titled – “Yidden Shikn a Kleyn Shifl Tsu di Levona”. But this is no satire and, as time will tell, no fiction.  This is the very serious goal of SpaceIL (pronounced Space-ai-el) — an Israeli NPO/NGO (non-profit/non-government organization), and one

I just returned from Belarus. I went back to my father’s hometown of Brest Litovsk, to shoot segments of a documentary, “Sacred Names”,  that I have been working on for the past couple years.  As I continue my discovery into this opaque part of my past, I started helping the local Jewish community to build a memorial. Out of the 32,000 Jews who lived in Brest during the war, only about

The young woman standing in front of us is seemingly nervous and out of her comfort zone.   She is likely new at this — presenting to grant committees.  But as our dialogue unfolds, this initial impression quickly evaporates.  Our presenter is sharing the work she is doing in Baltimore with Russian-Jewish teenagers — kids who, while Jewish by birth, either grew up in the former Soviet Union or are growing

Last March I teamed up with an Israeli classmate to take our MBA peers on an innovation and entrepreneurship trek to Israel. To incentivize students, we fundraised $75,000 toward subsidizing the 8-day trip and designed an itinerary based on student interests.  Of the 31 travelers, 28 were not Jewish and 25 were international participants representing 15 countries. The majority of their views on Israel were based on biased media. Some students

Perhaps I’ve been living among the redwoods and Patchouli oil in Santa Cruz for too long, but I’ve discovered an easy way and happy way to help Israel.  I’ve found that where I live, most people have one of three perspectives of Israel – either they 1. Don’t like it, or 2. Don’t really know about it, or 3. Both. It’s a mystery to me why this incredible “Start-Up Nation,”