Foundation News

As the longtime executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, Koret President Dr. Anita Friedman calls the coronavirus pandemic “the deepest and most profound crisis we’ve had to deal with in the last generation. This combines both a health crisis with a mental-health crisis with an economic crisis, and it affects everyone.” (Photo courtesy JFCS)

Koret, along with other major Jewish funders, released a joint statement addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, laying out an approach to their philanthropies as non-profits and communities face uncertain times.

Inside Philanthropy explores funding trends in Holocaust education among younger Jewish donors. Our CEO, Jeff Farber weighs in, “By teaching the lessons of history and imparting how they resonate within the context of today’s politics, Holocaust education programs can help reverse the worrying trend of growing identity-based hate.”

Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Girl in the Diary: Searching for Rywka from the Lodz Ghetto made its US premiere at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee. The exhibition, which originated at the Galicia Jewish Museum, will travel to museums across the US in the coming years.

Ron E. Hassner, the Helen Diller Family Chair of Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, shares how Israel scholarship and Jewish life has progressed at the campus in recent years. Today, the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Magnes museum, and Center for Jewish Studies contribute to a campus environment where Israel and Judaism are studied rigorously, carefully, and enthusiastically. (Photo Credit: Tikvah: Students for Israel)

Koret announced a partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Institute for Visual History and Education and Hold On To Your Music Foundation to develop a global Holocaust educational curriculum. The project will combine testimony, technology, and music to alter the field of Holocaust education for primary and secondary school-aged children around the world.

Koret announces a $10 million grant to the USC Shoah Foundation for a new global Holocaust education curriculum for elementary and middle school students. The announcement of this project is timely, as the world commemorates the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this week.

The UCSF Department of Ophthalmology has announced that its patient care facilities at Mission Bay will be named the Koret Vision Clinics, in recognition of a $10 million grant to the department, which houses one of the top 10 eye centers in the country. The new clinics will open in summer of 2020 and will substantially increase the number of patients seen each year and increase accessible, innovative vision care for the Bay Area and the world.

Former US ambassador to Israel and the Israel Institute’s new Board Chair, Daniel B. Shapiro, explains the importance of accessible, high-level courses about Israel to university campuses. In depth academic engagement about Israel is a critical way to ensure that students are educated and well-prepared for sophisticated discourse on Israel (photo credit: The Israel Institute).

The Koret-supported film, “The Remembered,” was selected as the recipient of the Documentary Film Grant from the JDC Archives, which houses one of the most significant collections in the world for the study of modern Jewish history. The film by award-winning writer and filmmaker Yoav Potash explores Polish-Jewish relations in the small town of Gniewoszów, Poland, in the years immediately before, during, and after World War II.