Bequest Worth at Least $500-Million to Support Jewish Causes

A California real-estate developer has bequeathed at least $500-million to a foundation that focuses on helping Jewish children and improving education in the religion’s traditions and history. The bequest will make the foundation one of the nation’s largest to focus on Jewish causes.

Jim Joseph, who died in December 2003 at 68, left the bulk of his fortune to a charitable foundation that bears his name. During his lifetime, Mr. Joseph, the founder of the Interland Corporation, a real-estate company in San Francisco and Davis, Calif., had channeled several million dollars to the foundation, which he started in 1987.

To help shape its future, the foundation has hired Charles (Chip) Edelsberg, vice president and director of endowments and foundations at the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, as its new executive director. In addition to his work in philanthropy, Mr. Edelsberg has held numerous teaching and administrative positions, including serving as the superintendent of Oberlin Schools, in Ohio.

The Jim Joseph Foundation, in San Francisco, will continue to give most of its money to organizations that it asks to apply for grants, rather than accepting unsolicited applications. It will finance organizations that work in Jewish education and offer other opportunities to Jewish youths, such as camping or trips to Israel.

Later this year, the foundation plans to hold a meeting of experts in education and other fields to discuss major challenges facing Jewish educational philanthropy and how it can best direct its grant making to support those areas in need, says Alvin T. Levitt, president of the foundation’s board and a San Francisco lawyer who represented Mr. Joseph during his lifetime.

The foundation also plans to collaborate with other foundations and could create its own programs, says Mr. Levitt.

Past grant recipients of the Joseph Foundation have included the Curriculum Initiative, in New York, which helps schools teach about Jewish history and culture, and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, in Boston, which works to strengthen Jewish day schools.

Mr. Levitt says that Mr. Joseph’s experience as an immigrant to the United States helped shape his belief in the importance of helping Jewish youths understand and learn about their heritage.

As an infant, Mr. Joseph left Austria with his parents shortly before the German occupation during World War II. His family settled in Los Angeles, where Mr. Joseph’s father ran a store. Mr. Joseph received his master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, before starting his own company.

“Mr. Joseph was really a visionary,” says Mr. Levitt. “It was very important to him to make sure the Jewish community remained strong in the future.”

Foundation’s Trustees

The foundation’s six-person board includes a mix of people who have been involved with the organization since its early years and individuals who have been recruited in recent months.

Mr. Joseph’s daugher Dvora, an HIV/AIDS expert who works for Population Services International, in Washington, is among the organization’s board members, as is Mr. Joseph’s brother-in-law, Jack Slomovic, a California businessman and real-estate investor.

At present, the foundation has hired only one employee, Mr. Edelsberg, but it expects to recruit from four to nine other staff members.

Mr. Edelsberg describes the job as the “professional opportunity of a lifetime,” providing the chance to build an organization from the ground up and to capitalize on momentum created by other foundations in support of Jewish day schools, camping, and congregational education over the last decade.

Jewish philanthropic organizations have worked during this time to find solutions to the dwindling numbers of young donors to Jewish causes and to the high numbers of young people who don’t retain close ties to their faith. According to a survey concluded in 2001 by United Jewish Communities, some of the efforts are beginning to pay off. The report found that a larger percentage of Jewish children attended Jewish day schools than ever before.

“I think we can be both an accelerator and an innovator,” says Mr. Edelsberg.

Among the challenges the foundation should focus on as it grows, says Yosef I. Abramowitz, chief executive officer of Jewish Family & Life, are increasing the number of young Jews who remain a part of organized Jewish life after their coming-of-age ceremonies, creating a core curriculum for Jewish day schools, providing opportunities to attend Jewish day schools to students who might not otherwise be able to afford it, and bringing more people into the Jewish faith.

“There couldn’t have been a more fortuitous time in American Jewish philanthropy for a foundation with their kind of focus to splash on the scene,” says Mr. Abramowitz.

Over the past several years conversations among people in Jewish educational philanthropy have focused on achieving universal Jewish education, he says, and “along comes the Jim Joseph Foundation and openly seeks to make sure that there is no Jewish child left behind.”