Good Thursday morning and mo’adim l’simcha!
Ed. note: In observance of chol hamoed, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the next Your Daily Phil will arrive on Wednesday, Oct. 19, after which we will resume our regular publishing schedule. Chag sameach!
In today’s Your Daily Phil, we give you an exclusive on a transformation at the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. In addition, we feature op-eds by BBYO’s Drew Fidler and FJC’s Jill Goldstein Smith on mental health during Sukkot, and by Stephen Mills on confronting child sex abuse. Also in this newsletter: Ron Krit, U.K. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Robert Toll. We’ll start with a new framework for grantmaking at the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.
After a year and a half of making no new grants, the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah will resume making grants early next year. The return to grantmaking coincides with a search for a new president and the rollout of a fresh organizational philosophy, shared with the foundation’s stakeholders yesterday via email.
The new philosophy centers on what the foundation, which funds innovative Jewish religious and ritual organizations, and has an annual budget of $3 million, calls the “three Ps” — standing for purpose, practice and people. The idea, in the foundation’s words, is that purpose, or “core aims and aspirations,” inspires people and guides practice, which includes rituals, norms and behaviors. People, meanwhile, live out the purpose through practice.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart, the foundation’s chair and acting president, told eJewishPhilanthropy that the three key words represent a sharpening of the foundation’s philosophy, rather than a shift. The foundation is still determining how the framework will influence its grantmaking.
“We still are holding the center around applying living Torah wisdom, applying Jewish wisdom, we know we still are focused on organizations that are addressing the big human questions and bringing Jews into the conversation,” she said. Ayalon Eliach, the foundation’s chief ideas officer, told eJP, “Our hypothesis is that this can be a really useful framework both for understanding how we think Jewish wisdom can be applied throughout people’s lives [and] can be an incredibly helpful tool for our collaborators in creating programming that brings people what they’re looking for.”
The foundation froze its process for new grants in July 2021, when its then-president, Aaron Dorfman, departed to head A More Perfect Union, a Jewish pro-democracy initiative supported by the foundation. His departure came after a year in which the foundation funded a range of Jewish ritual and educational responses to COVID-19, from Zoom programming to being part of a consortium of foundations that funded an initiative to chronicle the Jewish experience during the pandemic.
“We have a strategy that is about looking out at the field… and seeing, where is there potential to do something that is meaningful across the board, meaningful to the field or meaningful to history for the Jewish community?” Kanfer Stewart said. “If we see an opportunity, we want to help step into that space.”