What We Do

The Jewish Defense Fund was not founded by committee or strategic plan. It was founded in response to a moment — the steepest rise in Antisemitism since the Holocaust — and a painful recognition that the organizations the Jewish community had long relied on were no longer rising to meet modern challenges.

JDF's founder is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor and a direct descendant of Rav Yeruchom Levovitz — the Mashgiach Ruchani, or spiritual leader, of the original Mir Yeshiva in Mir, Belarus. The Mir Yeshiva was not merely a school. It was the center of Torah scholarship for world Jewry — and the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact, its students and faculty carrying its learning through Shanghai and ultimately to Jerusalem and New York, where it stands today as the largest yeshiva in the world with over 9,000 students.

That legacy — of scholarship, of survival, of rebuilding — is the foundation on which JDF was built.

The founder brings over 25 years of experience in financial services, having served as a trader and manager of a hedge fund. The decision to build a permanent endowment as the structural backbone of JDF was not incidental — it reflects a conviction that Jewish security cannot depend on annual fundraising cycles. It must be funded in perpetuity, the way the great institutions of Jewish life have always been sustained: through lasting capital, not passing campaigns.

JDF exists because the moment demanded it. And because the people who built it understood, from personal history and family memory, what it costs when no one steps up.