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Good Thursday morning!

In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we cover the Yael Foundation’s two-day conference in Vienna, which came to a close last night with a sparkling gala. We spotlight the PRECEDE Foundation’s efforts to educate Ashkenazi Jews, a population predisposed to pancreatic cancer, about the potentially lifesaving impact of genetic screening and early detection, and report on the appointment of Phylisa Wisdom to lead New York City’s Office to Combat AntiSemitism. In an opinion piece for Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month, Rabbi Madeline Cooper shares her personal journey as a rabbinical student and offers recommendations on how to lower barriers to entry for aspiring clergy with disabilities; plus, Peggy Shapiro prescribes a treatment for antisemitism in medicine. Also in this issue: Mimi Kravetz, Ernest Rady and Leon Levy.

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Uri Poliavich swept into Vienna’s Hofburg Palace's Imperial Ballroom last night, flanked by bodyguards, past marble columns and beneath chandeliers that had once illuminated the royal balls of Habsburg royalty. Assembled were the roughly 200 Jewish educators and grantees from 37 countries following a lavish two-day confab. At the swanky gala dinner and awards ceremony, replete with open bars, live music, flashy lighting and glatt kosher food served on fine china, the assembled principals and communal leaders anticipated the much-anticipated reveal: How much of the online gambling entrepreneur's fortune would flow to their schools in 2026 from his Yael Foundation, which funds Jewish schools around the world, reports Rachel Gutman for eJewishPhilanthropy from the conference in Austria.

Onstage, Poliavich, an unassuming man in a baseball cap and casual jacket, delivered brief remarks before exiting as dramatically as he'd entered. The answer to the question on everyone’s minds was characteristically ambitious but also deliberately vague. “We will keep growing in terms of new partners who will be growing in terms of investing in existing projects.” To the assembled, he assured: “This will allow you to bring more kids. So that's why we're here.” 

Unlike at the Yael Foundation’s two previous conferences, in which the annual budget was announced to great fanfare, this year there would be no such specific commitment. At a press conference before the gala, Poliavich told reporters that the Yael Foundation — named for his wife — would grow its budget significantly from last year’s $42 million, but he wouldn't commit to a specific figure. “We always overachieve," noting a 20% increase from last year’s announced budget. "There are a lot of requests coming," he told journalists. One member of his team indicated to eJP that the budget for this year would likely be double that of 2025. 

What he did reveal: continued work on an $82 million flagship school in Cyprus, and plans for another in Lisbon in 2027 — the first Jewish school in Portugal, he said, since the 16th century. This, in addition to a heavy investment in a school in Rome and other projects around the globe.

The evening's carefully choreographed spectacle was emceed by Israeli celebrity mentalist Lior Suchard and featured a violin performance by freed Israeli hostage Agam Berger, as well as the handing out of 12 awards to grantees and personalities in the Jewish world. (eJP’s publisher, Max Neuberger, was one of the judges for the awards.)

Formed in 2020, the Yael Foundation is a relative newcomer to the Jewish philanthropic world but has already made a major splash through significant investments in Jewish schools, camps and other informal education programs around the world, including far-flung locales often overlooked by Jewish funders. And Poliavich plans to continue growing the foundation.

In the pre-gala press conference, Poliavich reached for a biblical metaphor to explain the foundation's trajectory in 2025. "The Jewish people, once we crossed the Red Sea, became a nation," he said. "That's something that happened to [the foundation] this year. We stopped being just a family [operation]... and we switched the mode to become more like a business." The organization has brought on several staff members and departments: account managers organized by region and language, a legal department, human resources, a construction division and security specialists. "With this structure, we can scale it 10 times," Poliavich said. "Like almost infinite."

Read the full report here.

Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with only 13% of individuals diagnosed surviving five years. Research shows Ashkenazi Jews are significantly predisposed to the disease, but Jamie Brickell, a 66-year-old attorney diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020, beat the odds: after undergoing chemotherapy and then surgery and then chemotherapy again, he was declared cancer-free eight months after his initial diagnosis. “The only reason why I was able to [survive] that is because it was discovered early,” Brickell told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher.  

Let’s save lives: “Today, Brickell serves as president of the PRECEDE Foundation, the fundraising arm of the Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection (PRECEDE) Consortium — a group of clinicians, researchers, patients and biopharmaceutical and technology companies dedicated to research and advocacy for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, with the goal to increase the five-year survival rate to 50%. The nonprofit is reaching out to the Jewish community about genetic testing and early detection, but it is proving to be a hard sell. Brickell believes the Jewish community hasn’t been interested because “when people hear pancreatic cancer, they automatically assume it's a death sentence,” he said. “The genetic testing that we would talk to them about doing, people figure, ‘What's the point?’ And we educate people that there is a point.”

Read the full report here.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani selected Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the progressive Zionist group New York Jewish Agenda and a critic of yeshiva education, to helm the city’s Office to Combat AntiSemitism, reports Will Bredderman for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.

Here and there: JI first reported in January that the administration was considering Wisdom for the job. But a source also told JI earlier this week that her past work as director of development and government affairs at Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed) — which criticizes the quality of secular education in Hasidic schools — had initially caused the mayor’s team some pause. In her public commentary, Wisdom has criticized some extremist rhetoric and actions — such as the anti-Israel protest in Times Square the day following the Oct. 7 attacks, the slogan “from the river to the sea” and boycotts of people labeled “Zionists” — but also defended critics of Israel and opponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

Read the full report here and sign up for Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff here.

“During rabbinical school, I traveled to a college campus to lead High Holy Day services,” writes Rabbi Madeline Cooper, director of learning and practice at Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “I arrived early, took a deep breath, gathered my notes — and then discovered that I couldn’t physically get into the room where I was scheduled to lead. There was no accessible entrance. My legs, already unsteady from symptoms I didn’t yet understand, simply wouldn’t manage the stairs.”

We can do this job: “Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month invites our community to widen its imagination about disability and leadership. This is part of why I choose to tell my story publicly. I want others who are navigating disability in Jewish life to know that they aren’t alone, and that leadership does not require a body that cooperates perfectly. If even one rabbinical student, educator or emerging leader can imagine a place for themselves because they see someone else doing it, then the vulnerability of sharing is worth it. But storytelling alone isn’t enough. A truly inclusive Jewish future requires structural change.”

Read the full piece here.

“Hospitals, clinics and medical schools are supposed to be neutral spaces dedicated to healing. Yet antisemitism is increasingly infecting these institutions,” writes Peggy Shapiro, executive director of the Center For Combating Antisemitism, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. “Health care has long been a pillar of Jewish communal investment and moral leadership… Jewish philanthropy has both an opportunity and an obligation to lead once again by ensuring that institutions entrusted with healing are equipped to confront antisemitism competently and ethically.”

A tailored tool: “Medical anti-bias curricula often examine racism and other forms of discrimination while omitting antisemitism entirely. At the same time, organizations focused on antisemitism education have rarely developed training tailored to health care’s ethical, clinical and legal realities. The result is a dangerous gap: Jewish professionals are left unprotected, institutions are unprepared and antisemitism continues unchecked in spaces where trust is essential. The Center for Combating Antisemitism, a division of StandWithUs that equips institutions with evidence-based tools to recognize, address and prevent antisemitism, has created a resource for addressing this gap.”

Read the full piece here.

Deciphering the Data: In an opinion piece for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mimi Kravetz reconciles how surveys by Jewish Federations of North America and others have found that support for Israel among American Jews remains strong even as identification with Zionism has declined. “The word Zionism has undergone what might be called ‘definition creep’ over time, shaped by a mix of political agendas, public discourse, and broader social forces. It has come to be understood as encompassing ideas that go far beyond its once-standard meaning. This helps explain why some Jews who feel deeply connected to Israel nevertheless resist or reject the Zionist label. They are not rejecting Israel’s existence or the idea of a Jewish state. They are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose, and do not want to be associated with. This distinction matters enormously.” [JTA]

Think of the Children: In Semafor, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman tells Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson about the need to reframe public perception of global aid to get today’s voters’ support. “The philanthropic community is ‘losing the argument’ on the benefits of global aid, the CEO of the Gates Foundation warned, after cuts in development spending led to the first increase in child mortality rates since the start of this century. … Most Western taxpayers still support foreign aid if they are told that the money will be spent effectively to save children’s lives, Suzman said. ‘Trying to articulate that case in its very human, deliverable context is a key part of reframing that [message to] see if we can actually rebuild some support for this kind of targeted, high-impact aid.’” [Semafor]

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First Lady Melania Trump welcomes freed Israeli hostages Aviva and Keith Siegel to the White House yesterday, one year after Aviva met the first lady for the first time and pleaded for help securing her husband’s release, reports Gabby Deutch for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider. 

In that meeting in early 2025, Aviva gave the first lady books that she had written about Keith, who grew up in North Carolina. Trump then passed those books to the president, the first lady shared yesterday. 

“I gave him the books, the books that Aviva gave me, and I explained the situation — where she thought that Keith was, how he was doing. She didn’t have much information, but she knew how much he was suffering, because she was with him for 50 days,” said Trump. “I explained to him everything, and I know how hard he was working.”

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