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Sylvan Adams, philanthropist known for boosting cycling in Israel, gives $100M to help Ben-Gurion U after Oct. 7
(JTA) — Canadian-Israeli businessman Sylvan Adams has donated $100 million to Ben-Gurion University as part of an effort to rebuild the south following the devastating Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, university officials announced at a benefit gala in Toronto on Sunday.
“If we want the south to flourish after the October 7th pogrom, we must invest in the south, beginning in its capital of Beersheba,” Adams told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.
Adams, a real estate magnate who moved to Israel in 2015, is perhaps best known for his support of cycling in Israel. He established the country’s first cycling institute and velodrome, created an eponymous commuter bike path in Tel Aviv and brought the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia competition to Israel in 2018 — at a personal cost of more than $20 million. He also owns the Israel-Premier Tech Cycling Team and won the world championship in cycling for his age group last year.
Aside from cycling, Adams and his family foundation have also supported the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; SpaceIL, Israel’s nonprofit space organization; and multiple medical centers in Israel. He also played a role in bringing pop star Madonna to the Eurovision song competition in Israel in 2019. He has given widely in his native Canada, as well.
The latest donation dwarfs any of that giving. The $100 million donation is the largest ever to an Israeli university and on par with the largest ever made to any university, matching splashy gifts that have been announced recently at Harvard and Duke universities in the United States.
It will go to boost a university that lost 82 members of its community on Oct. 7, including students, staff, faculty and their family members, according to a statement released by the university. The university has 20,000 students enrolled and employs 6,700 members staff, most of whom reside in the southern region.
The funds will focus on six key areas, including the future of the Negev and Israel, technological advancements, climate change, sustainability, and global health, BGU President Daniel Chamovitz told guests at the Negev Strong gala, which was hosted by the university’s Canadian fundraising arm, according to the statement.
Describing BGU as Israel’s “most important university,” Adams, who moved to Israel in 2016, cited its research in several sustainability arenas, including water management, solar energy, desert ecology, and climate change solutions – especially through its campus at Sde Boker, the desert kibbutz that was the retirement home of the country’s first prime minister and the university’s namesake.
Adams pointed to David Ben-Gurion as someone who “understood that the Negev is the beating heart of Israel.”
“One of our responses to the terrible October 7th attack and the rise of lies about Israel and antisemitism around the world must be to dedicate ourselves to Jewish values as a force for good,” Adams told JTA. “We build, while Hamas destroys. We teach our children to love, while they teach theirs hatred.”
The donation marks a significant investment in the future of Israel’s southern region and is seen as a beacon of hope and renewal after Oct. 7, according to Mitchell Oelbaum, president of Ben-Gurion University Canada. It comes as the country has a strengthened attachment to the region and as the mounting costs of war leave open questions about how prepared the Israeli government can be to make unrelated new investments in the near future.
“Our students, staff, and faculty persevered in the face of one of our country’s darkest moments,” Oelbaum said. “This gift comes at the perfect time for renewal.”
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The post Sylvan Adams, philanthropist known for boosting cycling in Israel, gives $100M to help Ben-Gurion U after Oct. 7 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Protesters Disrupt Holocaust Remembrance Day Event at Auschwitz
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
Anti-Israel protesters on Monday disrupted an event at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland, commemorating the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis.
The International March of the Living, an annual Holocaust education program founded in 1988, brings people from around the world to Poland each year for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — known as Yom HaShoah — to march on the path leading from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II.
Survivors of the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel joined 55 Holocaust survivors in this year’s march. However, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the coinciding record surge in global antisemitism, anti-Israel protesters gathered near the grounds of Auschwitz, sparking outrage.
Local police put up a barricade to prevent dozens of demonstrators from approaching the marchers, who passed by as the protesters shouted slogans including “stop the genocide.”
Anti-Israel protesters hold flags on the route of the annual International March of the Living, outside former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
Marchers, many of whom carried Israeli flags, responded by changing, “Free Gaza from Hamas!” and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
If you would have told me a year ago, that there would be protesters outside Auschwitz while Holocaust survivors are commemorating the Holocaust Memorial Day I would say you’re crazy.
pic.twitter.com/vASGX7llxE
— Elad Simchayoff (@Elad_Si) May 6, 2024
Danit Ben David, 87, said she was “outraged” at the scene.
“How dare they come here, on this day,” she told The Algemeiner.
For many of the thousands of marchers this year, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day has taken on less of a historic tone and more of a current one, in light of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel that launched the war in Gaza.
“I have always feared for Jewish existence in the face of antisemitism,” Phylis Greenberg Heiderman, president of the International March of the Living, told The Algemeiner. “But never has the fear and dread of the Holocaust been more palpable in our times.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 253 others during their invasion of Israel in what was the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Following the onslaught, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, antisemitism incidents skyrocketed to record highs in the US and several other countries, especially in Europe.
Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency, noted in a briefing with media from Israel that the scenes the Jewish state witnessed on Oct. 7 amounted to nothing less than a “pogrom.”
Others were more reluctant to draw direct comparisons.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog told the crowd in a video message: “Although the Holocaust stands alone in the history of human crimes, we have been grieving deep tragedy over the past months. The sickness of blind hatred has been unleashed once again, in our own world and time.”
Hershel Greenblat, an 83-year-old survivor from Atlanta, GA who accompanies students and highschoolers on the march, said he would not visit Auschwitz if it wasn’t for a sense of duty to educate the next generation.
“I don’t come to relive the past. The only reason I come is to be here with the students. To try to educate.”
Greenblat’s parents — from Poland and Ukraine, respectively — were both in the resistance against the Nazis. The octogenarian found his grandmother, for whom he was named, listed in Auschwitz.
Beyond survivors of the Holocaust and Oct. 7, several Arab and Muslim delegations from Israel and around the world also joined the march. Among them was a delegation organized by Sharaka (“Partnership” in Arabic), a nonprofit organization founded by leaders from Israel and the Gulf following the signing of the Abraham Accords, a series of historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab states brokered with the help of the United States.
The post Anti-Israel Protesters Disrupt Holocaust Remembrance Day Event at Auschwitz first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Ralph Benmergui visits the opening of Margaret’s Legacy, a new Holocaust education centre in Hamilton, Ont.
It’s a sunny and warm Thursday downtown in my city, where sandwiched between a paint store and the brick-and-mortar home of a sports app on Main Street is a place called JHamilton. The Hamilton Jewish Federation hasn’t always lived here, though. And like much in this community, it’s had its share of ups and downs. […]
The post Ralph Benmergui visits the opening of Margaret’s Legacy, a new Holocaust education centre in Hamilton, Ont. appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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The year 2023 was ‘off the chart’ year for antisemitism in Canada, according to the annual audit released by B’nai Brith on Yom HaShoah
A leading Canadian Jewish organization says high levels of anti-Jew hatred in Canada were present before Oct. 7—and have skyrocketed since the Hamas attacks on Israel and Gaza war. Now at record heights of antisemitic incidents across the country, B’nai Brith Canada says of its annual audit, the organization logged more than double the number […]
The post The year 2023 was ‘off the chart’ year for antisemitism in Canada, according to the annual audit released by B’nai Brith on Yom HaShoah appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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