Nurturing Jewish Identity

For nearly two decades, the Jim Joseph Foundation was a little-known grant maker, run by one employee who oversaw giving of roughly $1-million per year. Today, the San Francisco fund is one of the biggest names in Jewish philanthropy, awarding more than $45-million last year alone.

That transformation came thanks to a nearly $1-billion bequest from the group’s founder, Jim Joseph, who left the philanthropy most of his estate when he died five years ago at age 68.

Mr. Joseph, a California real-estate executive, wanted to use his wealth to preserve Jewish identity, so the foundation is using its additional money to focus on educating young Jews in the religion’s teachings and values.

Mr. Joseph’s commitment to Jewish life stemmed, in part, from his experience as an immigrant to the United States. He fled Austria as a child on the eve of World War II and remained deeply religious throughout his life.

“He was very concerned with the survival of the Jewish community in the United States,” says Alvin T. Levitt, Mr. Joseph’s lawyer and president of the foundation’s board. “He wanted to reach as many young people as possible.”

Charles (Chip) Edelsberg, who joined the foundation two years ago as its executive director, says the fund fosters efforts that make Jewish life and culture compelling and exciting to young people. That task, he says, is increasingly difficult today, as young people are bombarded with more and more options for how they spend their time and what they choose to believe.

“In the new millennium, Judaism is a matter of choice, it’s not a condition anymore,” says Mr. Edelsberg, who served previously as vice president at the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland.

‘Intellectual Capital’

Declining religious observance among young Jews has been a point of concern since at least 1990, when the National Jewish Population Survey found that young adults were less likely than their parents to visit Israel, support Jewish causes, or consider themselves religious.

Since then, efforts by philanthropists to strengthen Jewish identity have produced some gains. In 2001, a second report found that more children were attending Jewish day schools than ever before.

Experts in Jewish education say the Jim Joseph Foundation is poised to capitalize on that momentum. Particularly encouraging, they say, is the thoughtful approach the foundation has taken in shaping its grant making.

“It’s a role model for any organization going through this type of change,” says Joshua Elkin, executive director of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, a Boston charity that has been a grantee of the Joseph foundation since 1997.

Over the past two years, the foundation has asked the advice of leaders of Jewish organizations and paid for research on Jewish education, with the goal of informing not only its own grant making but also that of other donors.

In August 2006, the foundation held a meeting of 11 luminaries of Jewish education and philanthropy — Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University; Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service; and Rachel Levin, associate director of the Righteous Persons Foundation, among others — to discuss how its grant making could have the biggest impact. They plan to reunite this September to discuss the fund’s progress.

The foundation also supported two studies on Jewish education by Brandeis University’s Fisher-Bernstein Institute for Jewish Philanthropy and Leadership, in Waltham, Mass.

That research, along with presentations made by the experts who attended the fund’s 2006 conference, are posted on the foundation’s Web site.

“They’re creating not just financial capital, but intellectual capital for the field,” says Matthew Grossman, executive director of B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, in Washington, which receives support from the Joseph fund. “They’re provoking big thinking and making it very public.”

A Broad View

Some Jewish leaders also say that the Jim Joseph Foundation’s approach, with its emphasis on producing change in Jewish education as a whole, is rare among Jewish philanthropic organizations. Too often, says Mark Charendoff, president of the Jewish Funders Network, in New York, donors focus on supporting individual groups without seeing the bigger picture.

“I don’t think the field has developed enough so that people are taking a systemic look at what kinds of investments could create that rising tide that lifts all boats, like we have in some other fields of philanthropy,” he says. “Taking a broader scan of the needs is the exception rather than the rule.”

Inspired by both Mr. Joseph’s vision and what the fund’s leaders have learned over the past two years, the foundation has chosen to support a wide array of educational causes. It will award grants not only to schools and other traditional educational institutions but also to summer camps, service programs, groups that run trips to Israel, and organizations that sponsor other types of learning. (For more on the foundation’s approach to grant making, see article below).

While some donors see schools as the primary and most effective way to reach young people, Mr. Edelsberg, the executive director, says that notion is outdated. To reach out to young people, particularly those who don’t have ties to synagogues or other Jewish institutions, philanthropy needs to foster many approaches to learning.

“It’s mistaken to confuse education as schooling and schooling only,” he says. “Learning happens in incredibly dynamic ways, outside of established institutions.”

Rabbi Elkin, of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, which supports day schools, says bolstering nontraditional educational experiences can help the institutions his charity represents.

“Jewish education has suffered from what I would call a silo mentality, where people haven’t been able to see the synergies and crossovers,” he says. “I see it definitely as complementary.”

Real-Estate Fortune

The foundation itself is a lean operation, run out of a property owned by Interland Growth, a real-estate company started by Mr. Joseph, in the financial district of San Francisco. Mr. Edelsberg is one of seven full-time staff members and six part-timers.

Mr. Joseph donated ownership of his companies, Interland Growth and the Interland Corporation, to the foundation in his will. While the grant maker has diversified its portfolio over the past several years — about 45 percent now stems from holdings in the company — Mr. Levitt says that real estate will continue to be a big part of the fund’s assets.

Mr. Joseph, he says, “thought it was a valuable and excellent investment.”

The fund’s six-person board, meanwhile, includes both those who knew Mr. Joseph during his lifetime — his daughter, Dvora Joseph, and his brother-in-law, Jack Slomovic, among them — and one newcomer to the foundation. Mr. Edelsberg says he spent the first few months on the job sifting through minutes from past board meetings and talking with trustees, grantees, business acquaintances, and others who knew Mr. Joseph and his philanthropic interests.

“It was as though I were excavating and building an image of Jim,” he says.

Mr. Joseph grew up in Los Angeles, where his family settled after Austria. His father ran a small liquor store.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, Mr. Joseph borrowed a small sum of money from his father to start the Interland Corporation.

The company earned its owner great wealth by the mid-1980s. But during his lifetime, Mr. Joseph’s charitable contributions were relatively modest, particularly in comparison with his bequest.

“Jim was really focused on making money, not giving it away,” says Tad Taube, a friend and fellow real-estate developer. “I’m not saying that in a critical way, because he was damn good at making money.”

Mr. Levitt says that Mr. Joseph’s reluctance to take on a high profile also contributed to his decision to give after his death. “He was a very private person,” he says. “He would have been uncomfortable in that role.”

Friends say Mr. Joseph, who lived in the wealthy Bay Area enclave of Woodside, and later in Florida, was intensely competitive and ambitious. In addition to his real-estate business, he owned the Arizona Wranglers, a professional football team that was part of the United States Football League during the early 1980s.

But he was also deeply devoted to religion and often exhorted friends to become more involved with their Judaism. Mr. Taube says of Mr. Joseph: “He would go into hibernation during Shabbat and be very contemplative for a few days.”

‘He Was Really Smitten’

For the foundation’s staff members, the last few years have been a process of discerning how Mr. Joseph would have wanted to spend his money. Mr. Joseph focused his giving during his lifetime on day schools, often those with which he had a personal connection.

But those who knew him say that as Mr. Joseph aged, he began to adopt a broad view of how to educate young Jews.

At the behest of friends, Mr. Joseph traveled to a Jewish summer camp in Santa Rosa, Calif. For two hours, he stood transfixed in the camp’s dining hall.

“If I could use the term ‘blown away,’ that’s the term I would use,” says Jerome Somers, a lawyer and foundation trustee since the mid-1990s.

“He was really smitten with what he saw. Kids were just having a wonderful time, singing Jewish songs, dancing.”

Mr. Joseph shared with trustees his growing interest in supporting camps and trips to Israel at board meetings before his death, recalls Mr. Levitt.

Those conversations have fueled the fund’s recent grants of nearly $20-million to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, a New York charity that seeks to increase attendance at Jewish summer camps.

A few years before he died, Mr. Joseph also visited some newer schools and was influenced by the role that he saw technology playing in educating young people.

“He was very forward-thinking,” says Mr. Somers. “He was very much in favor of adapting to whatever it took to ensure a compelling and effective learning experience for young Jews.”

Those experiences, in turn, have contributed to the fund’s support of projects that are embracing new technology.

But despite the rigorous planning process, Mr. Edelsberg and the foundation’s other leaders cannot know how Mr. Joseph would have felt about each grant.

At the same time, the trustees familiar with Mr. Joseph knew him in different capacities and have various perspectives on him as a man and as a philanthropist.

For Mr. Edelsberg, that remains one of the biggest challenges to growing the foundation: “He’s not here to tell you if you’re making a mistake.”