Your Daily Phil: Real estate and scholarships in Israel + Defining empowerment | CPT PPP Coverage

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Good Tuesday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we report on the lifespan of a Jewish dads’ support group in Connecticut, and feature an op-ed by the Greater Toronto federation’s Yael Bendat-Appell on Jewish empowerment. Also in this newsletter: Laura Lauder, Caroline and Daniel Katz, Rabbi David Schuck, Leonie Lewis and Conan O’Brien. We’ll start with a real estate deal that could boost a scholarship program for disadvantaged Israelis.

In downtown Jerusalem near Jaffa Street, less than half a mile from Zion Square, a plot of land that now houses a parking lot and a collection of aging buildings may soon enable thousands of low-income Israeli students to receive scholarships to the nation’s premier colleges and universities — and a ticket to jobs in the country’s vaunted tech industry.

The two-and-a-half-acre piece of land is owned by the estate of Albert Benin, a real estate developer and businessman who died in 1999. But this year, following a lengthy rezoning process, it is going on the market. After the sale is completed, the price it will pull in — likely nine figures in dollars — will become an endowment for a nascent initiative called the Benin Scholars Program, run by the UJA-Federation of New York, which currently provides full financial support and professional coaching to disadvantaged students at three Israeli academic institutions.

The initiative, now in its second year, has an annual budget of $2 million, which is funded by previous real estate sales and the parking lot income, and covers tuition, room and board, professional coaching and psychological support for 180 students. But after the sale, that number is slated to increase to 700.

“[The land] is expected to generate a significant amount of money that will significantly increase the size of the scholarship program,” Irvin Rosenthal, UJA-Federation’s recently retired CFO, who is consulting on the sale and the endowment, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “As far as we know, it’s the largest undeveloped tract of land in the center city of Jerusalem.”

As of now, the program, which is named for Albert Benin’s parents, Rachel and Selim, is expanding. This year, it added 30 students at Ben-Gurion University in the southern city of Beersheva. Other scholarship awardees are at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, also in Beersheva.

According to Itzik Shmuli, UJA-Federation’s director general in Israel, students qualify economically for the program if they meet the requirements for a full scholarship at the university they’re attending. The scholarship recipients cut across Israel’s demographic cross section, he said, though UJA-Federation could not provide exact numbers. Another goal of the program is to draw a wider range of people into Israel’s tech sector, which has been criticized for being insufficiently diverse.

“That kind of hand-holding, to the extent that they need it, is there for them,” said Yael Israel-Cohen, director of planning and strategy for UJA-Federation’s Israel office. “Many are the first generation [of their family] in higher education, and that additional person making sure they feel confident and fit in is a very important part.”

Read the full story here.