Your Daily Phil |
OCTOBER 9, 2026
GOOD FRIDAY MORNING.
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we announce an upcoming Israeli election event that eJewishPhilanthropy and our sister publication Jewish Insider are hosting next week with the Anu Museum of the Jewish People and Peoplehood Coalition. We profile Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha of IsraAid, who is aiming to build bridges across the Middle East through medicine, and speak with Boston-based philanthropist Izhar Armony about his nonprofit Habaita’s push to improve education in Israel’s Western Negev region. We feature an opinion piece by Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin spotlighting their research on the role of faculty networks in the anti-Israel wave that broke over college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, and a piece by Sydney Altfield urging American Jewish communities to advocate for public funds to help keep day school education financially accessible even as security costs rise. Also in this issue: Rabbi Kenneth Brander, Tamir Sheafer and Daniel Klein.
Shabbat shalom!
Have a tip? Email us here.
For less-distracted reading over the weekend, browse this week’s edition of The Weekly Print, a curated print-friendly PDF featuring a selection of recent eJewishPhilanthropy and Jewish Insider stories, including: 3 years on, ICF aids 573 kids, young adults orphaned on Oct. 7 with the long, slow road to recovery; After years of hostage advocacy, Kibbutz Be’eri survivor turns toward the future; and The Siegels lost their home and community on Oct. 7. Now they’re finding their way forward. Print the latest edition here.
ADVERTISEMENT
What We're Watching
Mem Global will celebrate its 20th anniversary this evening with a Shabbat dinner in New York City.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Navi Pillay, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights and International Criminal Court judge, as the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Pillay, a South African jurist and sharp critic of Israel, served as the head of a U.N Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of genocide; Israeli officials have harshly denounced the selection, saying, “Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell.”
What You Should Know
A QUICK WORD FROM eJP'S JUDAH ARI GROSS
In two and a half weeks, Israelis will head to the polls for national elections, their first since the Oct. 7 terror attacks. The campaigns so far have primarily focused on issues of national security, sectarian divisions, religion-and-state, the economy and democracy. While there is broad recognition that this election has direct consequences for Diaspora Jewry and although Diaspora Jews care deeply about it, Israel’s relationship with Diaspora Jewry has rarely been on the agenda.
Next week, we will change that. On Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. ET, eJewishPhilanthropy and Jewish Insider, in partnership with Anu Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv and the Peoplehood Coalition, with support from Masa, the American Zionist Movement, the Jewish Federation of Tulsa (Okla.) and Belong, will host an election debate focused specifically on Israel’s commitments to world Jewry. We hope you’ll be there.
News
HEALING HANDS
IsraAid’s Yasmeen Abu Fraiha aims to build bridges in the Middle East through medicine
Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha awoke at the crack of dawn on Oct. 7 to sirens wailing and knew she needed to rush to Beersheva’s Soroka University Medical Center, where she worked in internal medicine. She expected to treat traumatic injuries caused by rockets fired from Gaza, as in previous attacks. Instead, she saw a bloodbath. But amid the chaos, Abu Fraiha glanced around and witnessed religious Jews treating Christian Arabs. Muslim doctors caring for settlers. Everyone was helping one another, no matter their background, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher.
Can’t go back: “I knew that the world has changed,” said Abu Fraiha, who now serves as the head of strategic partnerships in the Middle East at IsraAid, told eJP. “I can't go back to the hospital, to my nine-to-five, as if nothing has happened,” so she turned to IsraAid after seeing the agency supporting both Israelis post-Oct. 7 and Palestinians in Gaza. The organization had “the ability to see the humanity in both sides and say, ‘We are a humanitarian organization that will help everyone who is in need.’ That's quite significant and quite moving.”
SUNSET CLAUSE
Destined to dissolve: An Israeli nonprofit built to hand its work to the state by 2029
Boston-based venture capitalist Izhar Armony founded the nonprofit Habaita in 2024, giving it five years to boost the schools in Gaza border communities to encourage their displaced residents to return to the region. When that runs out in 2029, its leadership plans to wind it down, regardless of whether the demographic crisis it was built to reverse is fully solved. “If we say we'll be here forever, the government has no incentive to step in,” Armony told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Justin Hayet recently.
Fourfold growth: Habaita launched in the summer of 2024 with an NIS 20 million ($6.5 million) pilot, serving 9,900 returning students, in partnership with the Tekuma Administration, the governmental body overseeing the reconstruction of the Gaza border region. By the 2025-26 school year, the organization says, it was serving 40,000 students.
Opinion
DATA DIVE
The overlooked faculty roots of the post-Oct. 7 campus crisis
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Amcha Initiative co-founders Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin make the case that universities cannot seriously combat campus antisemitism until they address the problem where much of it is rooted: in faculty and departmental conduct.
More than a decade of our research shows that long before the Hamas attack on Israel, faculty anti-Zionist activism was already deeply embedded in academic life and had acquired the legitimacy, reach and staying power that made it a critical driver of the campus crisis that followed.”
UNDER PRESSURE
After Oct. 7, Jewish parents chose Jewish schools. Now we have to keep the door open.
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Teach Coalition CEO Sydney Altfield argues that with more Jewish families seeking to put their children in Jewish day schools since the Oct. 7 attacks and subsequent rise in antisemitism, communities need to advocate for public funds as well as Jewish philanthropy to ensure this option is financially accessible.
“Teach Coalition surveyed 63 Jewish schools across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida and found that the average school is spending more than $400,000 a year on security, 124% more than before Oct. 7, 2023. Per student, the cost has more than doubled, and families are increasingly being asked to bear the financial burden. … That creates a painful contradiction. At the very moment more parents are asking how to give their children a deeper Jewish identity, we risk making that future harder to afford.”
Worthy Reads
New Three Ps Please: In Semafor, Mohammed Sergie, the outlet’s Gulf editor, interviews Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation CEO Sonia Ben Jaafar, who says a younger generation of Gulf donors wants to help design programs as Western aid cuts leave gaps that philanthropy cannot fill alone. “The narrative that philanthropic capital will just fill that up is not going to happen. ... We need a new model of how public, private, and philanthropy — this is the new three Ps — are going to partner together.”
The Laws of Mourning: In The Wall Street Journal, Rabbi Kenneth Brander, the president and rosh yeshiva of Ohr Torah Stone, reflects on Jewish mourning practices as the world marks the third anniversary since the Oct. 7 terror attacks. “In Jewish practice, when one says the name of a deceased person, one adds the phrase ‘may his memory be a blessing.’ The goal of mourning is to make that phrase true: The memory of the dead actually improves our physical lives and our moral selves.”
Crumbling Ivory Tower: In Haaretz, Meirav Arlosoroff interviews Hebrew University President Tamir Sheafer about what he describes as the perilous state of his school and Israeli academia. “‘The fact that Hebrew University is still ranked among the world's 100 best universities is a miracle,’ he says, suggesting that the miracle may not last much longer.”
Community Comms
The Bronfman Fellowship announces applications are open for its 41st cohort of Jewish 11th-graders.
SPONSORED | Email us to place an advertisement to the eJP readership of your upcoming event, job opening or other announcement.
Major Gifts
The DLA Piper Israel Charity Basketball Tournament, pitting 10 Israeli law firms against each other on the other kind of court, raised NIS 172,000 ($56,000) to provide meals to residents of northern Israel…
Brandeis University’s “America and its Jews at 250,” an open course on Jewish life in America, received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of up to $25,000…
Transitions
Word on the Street
Susan and Michael Dell appeared with President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday, where Michael Dell announced that 10 million of the 25 million Trump Accounts funded by their $6.25 billion pledge have been funded and the rest will be by week’s end. Trump praised Susan Dell and joked she should run for office…
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs released an open letter urging candidates in both parties to reject antisemitism and political violence in their own coalitions before the midterms, warning that conspiracy theories and efforts to exclude Jews are becoming normalized, Jewish Insider’s AJ Rodriguez reports…
In Philanthropy Roundtable, Jamie Lundberg writes that donor-advised funds need no new federal rules because their sponsors already police inactive accounts, citing $54 billion in grants in 2023…
Fortune magazine reports that wealthy baby boomers are losing confidence their heirs will carry on family giving even as Bank of America data show Gen Z and millennial donors support more causes and take a more hands-on approach than their parents…
Sheryl Sandberg tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his podcast “All There Is” that she found love again after her husband, Dave Goldberg, died in 2015, and urges adult children of widowed parents to encourage them to date…
Bloomberg reports that billionaire Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which now manages more than $65 billion, is expanding beyond startups into public markets and trophy assets, citing iting Kushner's proposed $12.5 billion deal to buy the Los Angeles Lakers...
In a closed lecture series in Nashville, Tenn., Peter Thiel argued in religious terms against AI regulation and called Pope Leo XIV and former President Barack Obama opportunistic on AI…
OpenAI said on Thursday that Iranian operatives used ChatGPT to help place nearly 100 articles criticizing the Iran war under fake journalist bylines in roughly a dozen online outlets around the world…
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said he “strongly” backs the creation of an Oct. 7 memorial in Brooklyn; any future memorial, the funds for which are being privately raised, would require the approval of the mayor’s office to move forward…
The Gaza Children’s Village network is planning to use AI to monitor classroom lessons for “hateful” speech and ensure teachers adhere to a peace-focused curriculum…
Germany’s Left Party, which won a plurality of votes in last month’s state elections in Berlin, agreed to measures to address antisemitism within the party as part of coalition talks with the Social Democrats and Greens…
The FBI charged Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, with buying an AK-47 to attack the Mall of America for ISIS, after he told an undercover agent he targeted it because its owners are Jewish…
Stephen A. Jarislowsky, a German-born Jewish refugee who founded the investment firm Jarislowsky Fraser in Montreal and later endowed about 50 research chairs at Canadian universities, died at 101…
Photo of the Day
NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Scientists David Nagib of Ohio State University, Jonathan Rivnay of Northwestern University and Patrick Hsu of the Arc Institute and Stanford University joined Len Blavatnik, founder of Access Industries and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation (second from right), at the 20th anniversary gala of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists earlier this week at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Each received $250,000 for research in drug chemistry, implantable medical devices and gene editing, respectively.
Birthdays
COURTESY/RONALD S. ROADBURG FOUNDATION
Mark Gurvis, former executive vice president at JFNA, now CEO at the Vancouver, British Columbia.-based Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, turns 67 on Sunday
FRIDAY
Brian Lamb, founder and retired executive chairman and CEO of C-SPAN, known for his unique interview style, turns 85
Charles Miller, retired federal government manager and analyst
Bernard Dov Cooperman, associate professor of Jewish history at the University of Maryland, turns 80
Richard Marpet, Burbank, Calif., resident
David Jacobson, U.S. ambassador to Canada during the Obama administration, then vice-chair of BMO from 2013 to 2024, turns 75
Don Garber, commissioner of Major League Soccer since 1999, turns 69
David Gerstman, research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
Eric S. Kassoff, president of Wilkes Artis, he is active in AIPAC, the Washington JCC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, turns 66
Debby Arzt-Mor, retired director of Jewish learning at the Brandeis School of San Francisco
Todd Richman, managing director and financial advisor at Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management and chair emeritus of Democratic Majority For Israel
Simon Sinek, best-selling author and motivational speaker, his 2010 TED Talk about leadership is one of the most popular talks of all time, turns 53
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, rosh yeshiva at Yeshivas Elimelech following 17 years as rabbi at Ohev Shalom Synagogue in Washington, D.C., turns 52
Neshama Carlebach, musician and singer, the protégé of her late father, singer-songwriter Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, turns 52
Karin Elharar Hartstein, member of the Knesset for Yesh Atid., turns 49
Benjamin Berger, senior vice president for Jewish education, community and culture at Hillel International
Justin Barasky, partner at TKO Political
Ben Lusher, CEO at Denver-based energy firm Nexus Energy Partners, he was the national board chair of Moishe House (now known as Mem Global) until 2022
David Meyerson, executive director of international initiatives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform
Ian Karmel, stand-up comedian and Emmy Award-winning television writer, turns 42
Lily Goldstein, vice president of portfolio management for LEO Impact Capital
David Cohen, counsel in O’Melveny’s NYC office, he was an executive assistant and advance associate in the Obama White House
Chaya Notik, physical therapist in Montreal
Jason Kaplan, vice president at L'Oréal, turns 36
Julia Schechter, senior manager of policy communications at Snap
Daniel Rubin, Israel-based vice president at JP Morgan
Kayla Levinson Segal, manager of in-stock management at Amazon in NYC
Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am on Oct. 7, 2023, where her team killed 25 terrorists and the kibbutz suffered no casualties, turns 28
Nick Itkin, foil fencer, he won a team bronze medal at the 2020 Olympics (Tokyo) and an individual bronze medal at the 2024 Olympics (Paris), turns 27
Y.O. Gross, gymnast and ballerina
You are receiving this email because rachel@ejewishphilanthropy.com signed up for updates from eJewishPhilanthropy.
Submit an op-ed • Send a tip • Advertise With Us • Subscription questions
© 2026 eJewishPhilanthropy • 228 Park Ave S • PMB 40660 • New York • NY 10003
Manage Email Preferences • View in Browser • Tracking Preferences