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Today’s American Jewish community is a mix of Orthodox and non-Orthodox, a blend of multi-generation Americans and emigrants from modern-day Israel. A recent Pew Research release, for example, suggests that Orthodox Jews have more in common with American evangelicals than with other ethnic Jews.

As American Jews diverge on matters of faith, increasing numbers are finding unity in what Israeli American Council COO Miri Belsky calls “Israeliness.” Israeli-American philanthropists like Adam Milstein advocate for the homeland by uniting religious and secular Jews in America around their common heritage.

BDS and the New Anti-Semitism

The pro-Palestinian BDS movement has gained favor by describing itself as a non-violent alternative to intifada. But by encouraging American businesses, universities, and other organizations to sever ties with Israel, BDS has created a groundswell of anti-Semitism, particularly on college campuses.

In a region filled with regimes trampling on human rights, BDS singles out the state of Israel, the Middle East’s only functional democracy, calling for boycotts and divestment from the Israeli government and Israeli businesses. BDS advocates, according to Milstein, gain a foothold on college campuses by aligning themselves with progressive causes, like LGBT advocacy and environmental protection. “Masquerading as social justice activists, this small group of dangerous radicals has been able to brainwash large numbers of students on campus after campus,” Milstein wrote in a Jewish Journal op-ed. “[They’re] forming alliances with groups working to promote rights of minorities, women, and LGBT members.”

Because BDS allies itself with popular progressive causes, students sometimes embrace it without truly understanding the movement. They’re caught up in a herd mentality that causes them to associate being progressive with being anti-Israel. The case of UCLA sophomore Rachel Beyda demonstrates how embracing BDS without thinking critically causes even well-meaning students to drift into anti-Semitism. “The last thing [a Jewish student] will be interested in is being a pro-Israel advocate because you’re being named and harassed, intimidated, and shamed,” says Milstein. “For a young person, they just don’t want to be involved. It’s too much harassment, too much of a headache.”

Anti-Semitism at UCLA

In November 2014, UCLA’s student council passed a resolution in support of the BDS movement. A few months later, when interviewing Jewish student Rachel Beyda for their Judicial Board, they asked whether her participation in Hillel and in Jewish sorority Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi made it impossible for her to be “objective” when considering issues before the council. Four student council members voted against Beyda’s addition to the board in spite of her outstanding qualifications. They were concerned about whether Beyda’s involvement with Jewish groups might make her disloyal to the student council.

The students might not have overtly understood their anti-Semitism when they asked the questions, but their actions eerily recalled questions Jews have been asked through history about their loyalty to rulers or governments. “The overall culture of targeting Israel led to targeting Jewish students,” said Natalie Charney, student president of the UCLA chapter of Hillel.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block called BDS influence “corrosive” and said the incident was a “teaching moment” for all involved. “To assume that every member of a group can’t be impartial or is motivated by hatred is intellectually and morally unacceptable. When hurtful stereotypes—of any group—are wielded to delegitimize others, we are all debased.

“There is no way you should be inferring people’s prejudices or their political views from their religion,” Block said in an interview. “I think this was a wakeup call, and in some sense I think [the students] were snapped out of it.”

Coming Together Around the Homeland

As a place to call home, Israel exists as a pair of bookends in the timeline of Jewish history. Between Biblical Judaism and the restoration of Israel in 1948, Jewish identity had less to do with the homeland itself as people bonded together around faith and local communities.

Some blame decreasing fervor for Israel on rising secularism among American Jews. Among the Orthodox community, which makes up 10 percent of American Jews, 84 percent believe the Jews have a God-given birthright to Israel. Pew reports 22 percent of American Jews—including 32 percent of Jewish millennials—now describe themselves as non-religious. Only 35 percent of all American Jews say they believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and only 30 percent describe themselves as very attached to Israel.

Milstein, whose Milstein Family Foundation supports a wide range of pro-Israeli causes, including the Israeli-American Council (IAC), believes that American Jews, even without a strong allegiance to faith, can come together around a new appreciation for their Israeli heritage. Milstein has called on his fellow Israeli Americans to strengthen ties to the Jewish community and strengthen their pro-Israel advocacy efforts.

“It’s much easier to explain Israel’s security challenges when your family lives in Sderot or you have served in the Israel Defense Forces,” Milstein says. “Instilled with our culture’s characteristic boldness, [we] can form an army of activists who are unafraid to stand up and speak out.”

Toward an Israeli Identity and Away From Helplessness

Miri Belsky says the American way of practicing Judaism centers around synagogues and religious congregations. For Jews who are drifting away from their faith, a focus on Israeli heritage and culture can become a uniting force.

Milstein is one of the central figures within the Israeli-American Council, which hosts annual Celebrate Israel festivals in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Pembroke Pines, Fla. In Los Angeles alone, the 2015 festival drew over 15,000 attendees; in Florida, over 8,000 attended.
Celebrate Israel draws equal numbers of Israeli-Americans and American Jews. The Pembroke Pines festival featured a Mahane Yehuda Market designed to imitate the giant open market in downtown Jerusalem. It also featured a replica of the Wailing Wall, a deeply meaningful symbol even to non-practicing Jews.

In addition to uniting Israeli-Americans and American Jews around celebrating their cultural heritage, Milstein and the IAC have given Jews in America the chance to demonstrate real support for Israel. During last summer’s Gaza operation, IAC sent care packages and letters to Israeli soldiers. As another way to show support, they also sponsored a program called “Bring Back the Summer,” which sent Israeli soldiers who’d finished their tours to relax at a Red Sea resort in Eilat.

Milstein and others like him want philanthropic gestures like this to unite Israeli-Americans and American Jews around positive ways to support Israel. Los Angeles Jewish Community activist Tal Rubin said of the Gaza struggle, “At every gathering, there was a palpable feeling of people wishing they could do something.”

Facts on the Ground

It’s not always easy to express pro-Israel sentiment when so many Americans don’t understand what’s happening in the homeland. IAC CEO Sagi Balasha, a native of Haifa, noted that last summer, American protesters shouted slogans like “Free Gaza” because they didn’t know Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

According to Adam Milstein, Israeli-Americans of his generation are neglecting their duty to educate American Jews about the homeland. “Expatriate Israelis keep thinking they are going back to Israel someday,” Milstein explained. “They have to realize that they are here for good. As the saying goes, they’re sitting on their suitcases. They don’t realize that they are actually sitting on a time bomb.”

The challenge Israeli-Americans face, says Milstein, is that unlike many American Jews, they have no religious infrastructure to pass on to their children. Also, the cost of joining a synagogue deters many Jewish young adults from becoming members of religious congregations. Milstein and his family founded Sifriyat Pijama B’America to give young Jewish children in America the chance to receive high-quality Hebrew books for free. Milstein hopes that when parents read classic Hebrew stories to their children, the tales and tongue of the homeland will woo them back to the Jewish community.

By uniting both religious and secular Jews in America around Israeli heritage, Milstein is working to preserve the future of the homeland he left. He hopes other members of the yerida, the Israeli-Americans who’ve moved away from Israel, will join him in his quest.

“Adam is strategic and he has become a tremendous role model for other philanthropists to follow,” says Roz Rothstein, CEO of the pro-Israel education group StandWithUs. “He is a good listener who recognizes the strengths of each organization and helps bring organizations together for the greater good of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Adam Milstein emigrated from Israel to America in the early 1980s. He finished his MBA, became a real estate developer, and earned his American citizenship in 1986. He stayed in America for 20 years without building deep connections with the American Jewish community. He sent his two daughters to Jewish day schools in Los Angeles, but both girls attended secular high schools.

Around 2002, Milstein realized how much he and his family had assimilated into American life and how little of his Israeli identity had been passed on to his daughters. “Kids don’t want to be Israelis or immigrants,” Milstein explained. “They want to assimilate into American culture and get as far away from their ‘foreign’ roots as possible.”

For Milstein, the first step was to re-establish his own Jewish identity. He started studying with Aish HaTorah Rabbi Dov Heller, and he started attending Aish L.A. events. As he surveyed his fellow Israeli-Americans, it became clear he wasn’t the only one who had assimilated. Despite the presence of a thriving American Jewish community, Israeli-Americans had struggled to find their tribe. Milstein wanted to help his fellow Israeli-Americans build their own unique communities, and he saw an opportunity to unite his people around the Hebrew language.

The Pull of Home

Most Israeli-American live secular lives, so they don’t form bonds around the local synagogue. It costs money to join a congregation, and many Israeli-Americans avoid the investment because they assume they’ll go home someday.

It’s a phenomenon the Israeli-American community calls “sitting on suitcases.” Because they always assume they’ll return to Israel, they don’t make an effort to develop strong ties in Israeli-American communities. They assume it’s easy enough to speak Hebrew and observe holidays at home, especially because they don’t feel 100-percent American. Even with dual citizenship, Israeli-Americans like Milstein feel the tug of the homeland. “We grew up in Israel; most of us served in the army,” Milstein says. “Our character was galvanized by the time we served in Israel.”

The thought of going home has been historically reinforced by a vague guilt for leaving Israel. To move to Israel is called aliyah, the ascent; to move away is called yerida, the descent. Israeli-Americans don’t have to accept a yerida identity if they continue to say they’re going home. Yet by failing to plug into the American Jewish community, they end up assimilating by default. “As the saying goes, they’re sitting on their suitcases,” Milstein explains. “They don’t realize that they are actually sitting on a time bomb.”

Uniting Around Language

The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation founded the Sifriyat Pijama B’America, a charity devoted to providing free Hebrew language storybooks for kids aged 2 to 8. Milstein wanted to woo young minds to Hebrew at a young age by exposing them to written language, helping them develop oral fluency, and instilling a love of traditional Jewish stories.

He also had a second motive: to call Israeli-American parents back to their heritage. “We are trying to reach out to Israelis and embrace them and bring them back to Jewish life, Jewish education, and the Jewish people,” Milstein said. “This process doesn’t just happen through listening to bedtime stories in Hebrew. We hope that once they read the books to their children, it will create an appetite for more Jewish life.”

Milstein isn’t the only person who’s argued in favor of more Jews in America developing Hebrew fluency. Speaking to American Jews, David Hazony, author of “The 10 Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Moral Text Can Renew Modern Life,” says that it’s impossible to participate in Jewish cultural life without knowing Hebrew.

“By learning Hebrew en masse, American Jews just might find a great deal of what they’ve been looking for to help cure their own inner cultural malaise,” Hazony has written. “We can’t be united by religion or geography or politics, but our common ancient language opens unlimited doors to deepening, enriching and ultimately creating new, exciting expressions of Jewish life.” American Jews feel fondness for Israel, he says, but they know nothing of its popular culture or modern spiritual struggles. They want to hear about political issues, but they don’t feel connected to the culture or artistic achievements of Israelis.

Merging Two Cultures

Adam Milstein is also one of the founders of the Israeli-American Council. It’s an organization dedicated to helping Israeli-Americans come together as a community.

In a way, the IAC is adopting the American Jewish model of community-building. It’s forming a network of voluntary, self-funded groups around the country to unite Jews and to advocate for Israel. For example, the IAC’s Meetchabrim meetings in Boston have helped the Israeli-American community in that city develop community-oriented projects. First, the community launched an Israeli LinkedIn group to help young Israeli-Americans build their professional networks. Second, they’ve started organizing events for different age groups, from children to families with children to Israeli-American empty nesters.

Nearly one-third of Jewish millennials are also “nones,” meaning they have no religious affiliation. Building activities around the Hebrew language helps Milstein unite communities that don’t necessarily practice Judaism.

In addition to programs like Sifriyat, the Milstein Family Foundation and the IAC support programs like Hebrew language programs for elementary school students and Hebrew sleepaway camps for older kids. Milstein is also working to create a dedicated social media platform for Israelis in America.

Building Support for Israel

One of Milstein’s biggest initiatives — and an important initiative for IAC as a whole — is to advocate for the state of Israel. He is deeply concerned that anti-Zionism, both within the Jewish community and without, is becoming a form of anti-Semitism.

Both Jews and non-Jews have political disagreements about the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, and both Israeli-Americans and American Jews land on all points of the left-right political spectrum. Unfortunately, many young Americans, out of a desire to be labeled as progressive, develop an anti-Israel herd mentality. They decide all pro-Israel arguments are wrong without developing a deep understanding of life in the state of Israel.

For example, when conflict escalated in Gaza in 2014, former IAC CEO Sagi Balasha says Americans, particularly young Americans, would chant slogans like, “Free Gaza!” They didn’t know, that Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, and they didn’t understand that Gaza was also being blockaded by Egypt on the other side.

Additionally, Jewish students on American college campuses have found themselves facing discrimination from students with anti-Israel sentiments. “Many students, I think, they view Jews as just part of the ‘white majority,’” says Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA. “And that is not the way Jewish students view themselves. Some of them are two generations from Holocaust survivors. It’s a very difficult feeling than maybe what some individuals looking at them feel they represent.”

To help the young adult children of Israeli-Americans learn to advocate for the homeland, the Milstein Family Foundation supports Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization that provides free trips to visit Israel. While in Israel, young Israeli-American adults aged 18 to 26 learn about their history and immerse themselves in Israeli culture and Hebrew language. Milstein hopes they return with a new appreciation for what’s being accomplished at home and also with a deeper knowledge of Israel’s struggles.

Toward a Single Identity

The Hebrew language is helping Israeli-Americans build their own community. At the same time, Milstein acknowledges that within 20 to 30 years, Israeli-Americans won’t really exist as a separate community. He wants them to merge with American Jews, but he also wants them to reshape Jewishness in America by building a connectedness through the Hebrew language to the Jewish homeland in Israel.

Jews living in America face less discrimination than their counterparts in Europe and Russia, yet growing anti-Israel sentiment makes it tougher for them to advocate for their homeland. Israeli-Americans, according to Milstein, are in a unique position to combat pockets of anti-Semitism in America.

“Israeli-Americans — instilled with our culture’s characteristic boldness — can form an army of activists,” Milstein says, “who are unafraid to stand up and speak out against the lies about the Jewish state and the Israeli people.”

Newfound Appreciation

Even in Israel, politicians have realized the value provided by those who came to American in the yerida. They are no longer those who left; they’re respected as ambassadors whose influence will shape the future of the state of Israel. Adam Milstein and his fellow Israeli-Americans aren’t just passing Hebrew to a new generation. They’re ensuring the Hebrew language — and those who speak it, even if they live in America — will always have a home in Israel.

The concept of tzedakah isn’t directly mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, but it’s one of the biggest reasons why so many people of Jewish descent get involved in philanthropy. Tzedakah isn’t charity, exactly; charity implies giving from generosity of spirit or compassion. Tzedakah is an obligation, borne from an ancient understanding that your money belongs to G-d anyway, and he expects you to give some to others as part of good stewardship.

Some argue that tzedakah is as much about giving time as it is about giving money. According to Maimonides, the highest form of tzedakah gives others the ability to become self-sufficient. Religiosity isn’t a prerequisite, either. Giving back is simply ingrained in Jewish culture. These five Jewish and Israeli Americans have made tzedakah part of everyday life.

1. Adam Milstein: “Whatever We Give to Charity, God Gives Us 10 Times More”

After coming to America and graduating with his MBA from the University of Southern California, Israeli-American Adam Milstein became a multi-millionaire thanks to his work as a real estate developer. He had a business partner who taught him about the concept of ma’aser, or tithing. It’s a custom of giving 10 percent of your income away as part of tzedakah.

Milstein isn’t married to the 10 times figure; he just knows that what you give comes back to you, multiplied. “Whatever you give, you get more. Not necessarily 10 times more, but you just get more.”
The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation supports a wide range of local charities in Los Angeles, including Bikur Cholim, a charity devoted to providing companionship and activities for the homebound, and Beit T’Shuvah, a residential facility for addiction treatment. Milstein also co-founded the Israeli-American Council and supports a number of on-campus groups, for Jewish and non-Jewish students alike, to build awareness about Israel and Middle East policy.

For Milstein, tzedakah is about helping Israeli-Americans and American Jews embrace their Jewish identities. One of his efforts, Sifriyat Pijama B’America, gives Jewish children access to high-quality Hebrew storybooks and music. Milstein gives money, but he also devotes 80 percent of his time to his philanthropic efforts. “[It takes] more time to spend your philanthropy money than to make it,” he says.

His biggest contribution, according to Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs, is his ability to bring groups together to work for a common cause. “He is not only generous and makes good work possible, he is a good listener who recognizes the strengths of each organization and helps bring organizations together.”

2. Natalie Portman: “It’s Not Charity. It’s Just Widening Opportunity”

When Natalie Portman was a senior at Harvard, something happened to a friend back in Israel. Although the Jerusalem-born actress has never publicly specified what happened, she said it gave her a newfound drive to contribute something to the world. Fresh off her success as Padme Amidala in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” she called Queen Raina of Jordan to discuss Middle East peace. Queen Raina had another topic on her mind: microfinance.

She told Portman about an organization called Foundation for International Community Assistance, or FINCA, which championed microfinance in South America, Central Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Portman agreed to visit some of the countries helped by FINCA, so she trekked to Guatemala and Uganda. She realized how getting small loans to bolster their business prospects made women self-sufficient.

“When the women talk to me, they say how good they feel about themselves,” she told The New York Times. “When you ask what’s the best thing about this, they say, ‘I can kick out the man who was beating me.’”

Portman began advocating for FINCA and microfinance during public appearances and in prominent magazine interviews. She also became patron of the UN’s Year of Microcredit and spoke about her experiences at her alma mater as well as at NYU and Stanford University.

In many countries, the poor have little access to banking, and banks hesitate to make small loans because they make little profit after they incur loan processing costs. Portman says FINCA loans have a 97 percent repayment rate, and the recipients are almost always women.

FINCA now serves 1.8 million clients in 23 countries, and its success has made even larger banks reconsider microlending. “There is no better gift than giving women living in poverty the ability to provide for themselves and their families,” says Portman.

3. Steven Levitt: “We Should Be Rewarding Philanthropists Based on Their Results”

Steven Levitt was born to Jewish parents and became famous as co-author of the bestselling book “Freakonomics.” In addition to serving as the University of Chicago’s William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, he has co-founded an effort to improve worldwide philanthropy by helping not-for-profits increase ROI.

His Greatest Good partners include Jewish Nobel laureate and economist Daniel Kahneman, physician Atul Gawande, and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. According to Levitt, The Greatest Good is founded on five bedrock principles:

1. Figuring out how to do good in the world generates the most important questions we ask ourselves.
2. Humanity’s biggest questions call for dedicated, truth-seeking minds.
3. Solving big problems like obesity, drug addiction, and low-performing schools requires a commitment to long-term, prolific, and daring experimentation.
4. Real problem solving requires humility and a willingness to reject hypotheses that don’t stand up to experiments.
5. Large-scale problems require experimentation on a grand scale with large upfront investments.

Levitt likens the type of experimentation advocated by The Greatest Good to R&D within the pharmaceutical industry. He says pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money upfront to experiment on medications, many of which never come to fruition. The ones that do make it out of the pipeline, however, have a tremendous positive effect. “Even if 99 percent of the projects fail, the 1 percent that succeed could yield super scaled impact.”

The Greatest Good hopes to encourage philanthropy from a deeper set of values, not from guilt. He wishes more donors espoused what Adam Milstein calls “active philanthropy,” which is a commitment to spend time ensuring that your charitable investment pays off. Levitt argues that like private sector investors, philanthropists should be judged on the ROI of what they give. “This would keep them engaged in the process and have them focus their efforts on generating super scaled impacts and positive return.”

4. David Geffen: “You’re Making the World a Better Place”

Recording industry giant and DreamWorks SKG co-founder David Geffen has always been passionate about HIV/AIDS and LGBT equality. The David Geffen Foundation has given millions to these causes, but lately, Geffen is focused on fixing America’s looming doctor shortage.

According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. will face a shortage of as much as 90,000 doctors by 2025. One of the biggest deterrents to entering the medical profession is the high cost of education. Seventy-nine percent of medical students graduate with over $100,000 in student debt. Almost half owe $200,000 or more on student loans.

In 2002, Geffen donated $200 million to UCLA’s medical school. A year later, he donated an additional $100 million to fund scholarships for incoming medical students. Thanks to Geffen’s donation, one in five UCLA medical students will graduate debt-free, and his efforts have caused medical schools around the country to find ways to help their own students graduate free.

For his work, Geffen was recently presented with the prestigious UCLA Medal. “Your national movement to relieve medical students of debt has prompted more young people to pursue careers as physicians,” the medal citation read.

5. Miriam Adelson: “By Treating One Person, We Can Save Many Lives”

Miriam Adelson, wife of billionaire Sheldon Adelson, met her husband after becoming a medical doctor. She still puts on her lab coat every day to conduct research and treat patients for substance abuse.

Adelson’s parents fled Poland in the wake of the Holocaust, eventually settling in Haifa. She graduated from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Medical School, specializing in chemical dependency and drug addiction. After marrying her casino magnate husband, Adelson founded a research clinic and treatment center for substance abuse at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv. She also opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in her new home, Las Vegas. She and her husband, along with Adam Milstein, are strong backers of the Israeli-American Council.

For Miriam Adelson, helping a person beat drug addiction is the equivalent of saving 20 lives. “Treating one drug addict reduces his criminal activity, reduces his arrests…reduces him being infected with HIV and Hepatitis C while sharing needles, and reduces his infecting others if he is already infected,” she said in an interview with Fortune. “It also improves his general medical condition, improves his behavior at home and in the environment, improves his work habits, and has a positive impact on his family by having a normal person around them.”

To Adelson, her signature white lab coat is worth far more than any designer suit she’s ever worn. “Ask me which one I prefer,” she says, “and I will tell you that with no doubt, it is the white one.”

Tzedakah in Action

For Jewish philanthropists and visionaries like these, tzedakah isn’t done out of religious obligation or guilt; it’s simply a way of life. By devoting their lives to empowering others, they’ve embodied the highest ideals of Jewish culture.

But Milstein, 63, who was born in Haifa and served in the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur War with Ariel Sharon’s brigade, wasn’t always so giving.

Three years after moving to Los Angeles in 1981 to attend business school at USC, he began what has been a successful career in commercial real estate with Hager Pacific Properties, where he continues to work full time as a managing partner. In 2007, Milstein — a member of Valley Beth Shalom and father of three — co-founded the Israeli-American Council (IAC), and he recently was named national chairperson.

Somewhere along the line, Milstein was introduced to the idea of philanthropy. He recently sat down with TRIBE to talk about Israeli philosophies on giving, who and what led him to take a different route, and what he’s doing to instill the value in the next generation. An edited version of that conversation follows.

TRIBE: Did you learn to be philanthropic from your parents?

ADAM MILSTEIN: No. Really what the Israeli and Israeli-American community is missing is philanthropy. But the Orthodox Jews have grown up with philanthropy … and the fact that I had a [business] partner who is Modern Orthodox, I got introduced to philanthropy at a very young point in my life, and introduced to the joy of giving and the rewards of giving. I remember about 15 years ago I had many discussions with him, as to, “So, what do we do now?” It’s not satisfying just to continue to make more money and more money. At some point, you want to do something valuable with your money, leave an impact, create a legacy, make your community better. This was really the point that I got more involved in philanthropy.

My wife and I established the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation. Over the years, we have established a specific mission. We want to strengthen the Jewish people, we want to strengthen the State of Israel and we want to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance. So, all the charities and entities we give money to need in some way to accomplish our mission.

T: Would Israelis and Israeli-Americans argue with your point that they aren’t naturally charitable?

AM: They would not argue. In Israel, there is a phrase called “freier.” Freier is a sucker. In Israel, to give money to charity, you are a sucker. This is the attitude. In Israel, the public gets everything free from the government — from social services to schools to temples. So people aren’t used to giving money. As of now, it is being introduced more and more because there are a lot of people in Israel who don’t have a home or don’t have food. So when we created the IAC, we said we want to encourage and inspire philanthropy.

T: How do you do that if people aren’t used to giving?

AM: One of our slogans is, “We aspire to be a freier.” You think that to be a sucker is stupid; we think it’s smart. We want to lead by example. We are givers. People see that we get respect and make accomplishments by giving. They see if it’s good for [entertainment mogul] Haim Saban to give, if it’s good for Adam Milstein to give, if it’s good for [IAC co-founder] Shawn Evenhaim to give, then it must be a good thing to give.

The other thing is [to] speak about it, speak about the fact that the giver gets much more than the receiver. In fact, there was an example that happened to me in my early partnership that convinced me that charity is a no-brainer. The way that the Modern Orthodox present philanthropy is they say it’s not that you have to give 10 percent of your earnings as philanthropy. It’s the opposite. Whatever you give, God gives you 10 times more. …

What do you mean? … I had some incidents with my partner where we were philanthropic one day and the next day something beautiful happened — suddenly we made a lot of money. The examples were so close that I couldn’t argue. It works this way: I think God is blessing the people that are blessing anyone else. God wants to really empower the people who are givers. And if I am a giver, God will say, “Let me make this person more successful so [he] can give more.”

T: Was this a hard talk with your wife?

AM: She was a partner from the get-go. We discuss the different program and grant requests. We make mutual decisions. She is the president of an organization called Stand By Me that helps families combat [cancer]. … So, my wife is more the soul of the philanthropy. Her heart is more into social justice, and I am more focused on strengthening Israel, the Jewish people, the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Obviously there are hundreds and hundreds of Jewish organizations in the United States. The names are confusing and you never know who is doing what. So over the years, we took it on ourselves every year to help another five organizations. I thought the only way you can learn about an organization is to give them money, come to their meetings. Now I think we have like 100, and I’ll tell you how we give: Besides the mission statement, we have a model of operation, and the model of operation says, first of all, we want to be active philanthropists, not just give money and forget about it, to make sure that there is an impact. Many times, we will create programs that didn’t exist. Organizations would come to us and say, “Can you help us?” And we will ask the organization, “Which programs are you running or which program would you like to run if you had the money?”

T: Can you give me an example?

AM: Let’s talk about AIPAC. … They said, “There is a program that we love, [but] we don’t have money for it. We would like to take non-Jewish student leaders to Israel, the people that will be the senators and congressmen of the world. They are in college today. We have identified them.” We said it’s a no-brainer to take non-Jews. Anyone you take to Israel comes back as a friend. So it has been maybe eight years since we established a program called the Milstein Family Foundation Campus Allies Mission to Israel.

The other program, for example, is Sifriyat Pijama B’America. Gila and I met Harold Grinspoon, the founder of PJ Library, on a trip to Egypt in 2010. We got friendly and we said, “We need to do a program together.” Then I thought, “We want to reach Israeli-Americans. The easiest way to reach the Israeli community is to give books in Hebrew to their kids.” I told Harold, “Why don’t we create the PJ Library in Hebrew in the United States?” And he loved it. We started with 1,000 families in 2011 and now we have 18,000.

T: I imagine you have to say no sometimes. Is it hard to say no?

AM: No. It is very easy. I am going back to the model of operation for our foundation because it is important. The first concept was active philanthropy. The second concept is synergy. That means every program we do needs to help other programs. We don’t like to help projects that are stand-alone and have no impact on anything else. We are looking for partnerships. We are looking for ways to make stronger relationships between organizations and to be creating a force multiplier so that one plus one equals five. … And the last [concept] is life pass. … Life pass impact means we don’t want to shoot and do one program here and one program there. We want to impact the life of our next generation, our young generation, in a systematic way. We have programs for every age group. The programs that we support are going from age 2 to age 40.

T: You have a pretty robust presence on social media, including nearly 40,000 Twitter followers.

AM: In general, anything I do I want to be good at. About two years ago, I was introduced to Twitter as a way to reach a wider audience of younger people. I decided to experiment with it. I think what it does is expand our circle of friends and partners, people reaching me from all corners of the world with ideas.

T: It seems like you really enjoy your role as a philanthropist.

AM: Yes. I am really very lucky to be in this situation. I have the resources to do whatever I want. If I want to sponsor something, I don’t have to look for money. I have enough experience with what works and what doesn’t work. I have enough connection with other organizations to see how it helps everybody. I am in a situation where I can really make an impact. For me it’s easy, but I think I am very fortunate to be there.

In Israel, they call it the Conceptzia. It’s a term used to describe Israel’s assurance of its own invincibility following the Six Day War. It was a decisive victory in which Israel seized the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Arab attackers lost over 20,000 forces; only 776 Israelis were killed.

By 1973, Anwar Sadat had claimed he’d attack Israel multiple times, but he’d never followed up on his promise. When Egypt began amassing ground forces and bridging equipment on the Sinai, Israel dismissed the movements as simple training exercises. As Syrian forces simultaneously gathered near the Golan Heights, Israel sent a few reinforcements, but nothing significant. Prime Minister Golda Meir and her administration didn’t believe their Arab neighbors would dare to attempt another attack.

In some ways, events leading up to the Yom Kippur War are reminiscent of events leading to the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. The Bush administration knew Osama bin Laden intended to attack, but they had their own conceptzia about American invincibility. Like America nearly 40 years later, Israel paid a heavy price for not preparing themselves in 1973. Two prominent Israeli-American philanthropists, Adam and Gila Milstein, are determined not to let it happen again.

The Illusion of Safety

In 2011, Israeli-American real estate developer and philanthropist Adam Milstein spoke to a gathering of Alpha Epsilon Pi. He told them he’d learned one lesson as a result of serving during the Yom Kippur War: never underestimate your enemies.

Milstein was transported from central Israel to the Sinai Peninsula following reports from Mossad that Egypt and Syria would attack in the afternoon hours or at sunset on October 6, 1973. The Mossad cable’s message was distorted by the time it reached commanders, leading them to believe the attack would definitely occur at sunset, at around 5:20 p.m.

As they waited in the Sinai in the early afternoon, Milstein’s artillery unit saw planes traveling overhead. They assumed the planes were Israeli Air Force planes going through practice exercises, but when the planes began to bomb them, they knew they were being attacked.

The Israelis took heavy losses as the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal. Simultaneously, Israel was almost defeated when Syria attacked the Golan Heights. Israel turned events around in the Golan Heights within 48 hours, and by mid-October, Adam Milstein, as a member of General Ariel Sharon’s division, crossed the Suez Canal to drive the Egyptians from the Sinai.

Three weeks after the Six Day War, Yitzhak Rabin had made a speech while receiving his honorary doctorate from Hebrew University, which Howard Sachar quoted in his 2013 book, “A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time.” Rabin spoke about how Israel overcame its enemies despite their superior weapons and fortifications, discussing “our airmen, who struck the enemies’ planes so accurately that no one in the world understands how it was done and people seek technological explanations or secret weapons.”

Unfortunately, Israel got carried away with its belief in its military might instead of remembering Rabin’s explanation for why Israel won: “Only their personal stand against the greatest dangers would achieve victory for their country and for their families… if victory was not theirs the alternative was annihilation.”

Adam Milstein never forgot how quickly the Zionist dream almost perished in October 1973. “Until our last day on Earth, we should never stop being humble,” he told members of Alpha Epsilon Pi. “Never get so caught in chasing your own recognition that you lose sight of who you are.”

From Israel to America

Adam Milstein grew up in Haifa. His wife, Gila, was born in Morocco. She experienced anti-Semitism personally as a child, growing up in a country where the Jewish people had no freedoms and no rights. Arab children would throw pieces of glass and rocks at Jewish children whenever they went outside.
One day, Gila’s family squeezed as many possessions as possible into a suitcase. They told everyone they were taking a vacation, but instead, they fled to France. When she arrived in Israel at age 6, she finally knew she had a place to call home. “We felt like it was our place,” she said in an interview, when she and Adam were honored for their service to StandWithUs. “We had everything kids need growing up.”

Gila went to nursing school at age 18. Three years later, she found herself treating soldiers wounded in the Yom Kippur War. She and Adam decided that if he came home from the Sinai in one piece, the two of them would get married. They married, and Gila became an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces medical corps. Their first daughter was, in Gila’s words, “an army baby.” Adam graduated from Technion, and the Milsteins moved to the U.S. with their two daughters. They intended to stay just long enough for Adam to earn his MBA from the University of Southern California.

After graduation, Adam and Gila decided to stay and work in America for a little while to offset Adam’s educational expenses. Adam began working as a commercial real estate agent, eventually meeting David Hager, an Israeli investor. The two of them, along with partner Robert Neal, built Hager Pacific Properties into one of America’s leading commercial real estate investment firms. Soon, more than a decade had passed, and the Milsteins hadn’t gone back to Israel. They were part of the yerida, living in the Diaspora.

Sitting on a Time Bomb

Like many Israeli-Americans, the Milsteins made a good living in America, but they never expected to stay. They were “sitting on suitcases,” as the expression goes, assuming they’d return to Israel.

One day, Adam mentioned to his daughters, who were in high school, that he wanted them to marry Jewish men. They asked him, “Why?” “I didn’t have a good answer for them,” Adam told Aish.com. “They pointed out that I myself lived a totally secular life. Why should they do otherwise?”

Adam realized that he and fellow Israelis living in America rarely integrated deeply into American Jewish life. In Israel, Jewish life was automatic. Everything ran according to the Jewish calendar. Israelis celebrated Jewish holidays in schools, with families, and in the public sphere. No one paid a fee to join a synagogue.

In the diaspora, Jewish life isn’t automatic, and between synagogues and private Jewish day schools, it can get expensive. When Israelis assume they are going home — sitting on suitcases — they don’t pour money into assimilation. Parents feel Israeli, but one day they wake up and realize they hadn’t given their children a connection to Jewish life and Jewish heritage. “In America, if you don’t make it happen,” Gila said, “it just doesn’t happen.”
The Milsteins realized that he was no longer just Israeli, something that hadn’t fully sunk in even when they obtained American citizenship in 1986. “It would be more appropriate to call us Israeli-Americans,” Adam said. “We grew up in Israel, most of us served in the army, and our character was galvanized by the time we served in Israel.”

Yet they no longer lived in Israel, and they were assimilating unintentionally — and rapidly — into secular American life. “You are part of the diaspora, but you don’t think so,” Adam explained, “because you always think you’ll go back home.” In other words, they weren’t sitting on suitcases. They were sitting on a time bomb.

Regaining Identity

Adam started attending Aish L.A. events and studying weekly with Aish HaTorah Rabbi Dov Heller. “I realized the only way maybe to correct my ignorance and mistake as an Israeli father,” he told an AIPAC gathering, “was to get closer to Jewish life and to demonstrate to my daughters that I was proud of my Jewish heritage and that our future, as a Jewish family, was of extreme importance to me.”

Adam and Gila’s quest to reconnect to Jewish life didn’t stop with their family, even after their daughters both married Jewish men. They also understood the financial obstacles presented by private Jewish day schools and synagogue membership. To recapture the hearts of Israelis in America, and to forge a new Israeli-American community, the Milsteins turned to something both universal and without cost: the Hebrew language.

The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation launched Sifriyat Pijama B’America to give Israeli-American children access to Hebrew storybooks. For no cost, Israeli-American families received children’s books written in the Hebrew language containing lessons about Jewish life and Jewish values.

The Milsteins weren’t just hoping to capture interest from Israeli-American children. They were making a direct play for the hearts of their parents. “We hope that once they read the books to their children, it will create an appetite for more Jewish life,” Adam said. “We are trying to reach out to Israelis and embrace them and bring them back to Jewish life, Jewish education, and the Jewish people. Otherwise they might be lost completely.”

The Milsteins also started supporting other organizations, like Taglit-Birthright Israel and Israeli Scouts, to expose Israeli children, teenagers, and young adults to Israeli culture. However, they also noticed how public opinion, particularly with the launch of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, was starting to turn against the Jewish people in their homeland.

They watched as anti-Semitic events on college campuses increased, and they knew they had to do something. To do nothing would mean underestimating their enemies. Thanks to the Yom Kippur War, the Milsteins knew better.

Galvanizing a Community

Adam and Gila never saw themselves as deserters of Israel. They saw themselves as ambassadors, doing their miluim service by supporting Israel in America.
“We have always told everyone around that we are a strategic asset for the state of Israel,” Adam said. “But now it’s becoming clearer and clearer that we indeed are ambassadors for the state of Israel here in the United States. We care, and we are willing to go on the offense. Not too many Jews are willing to do so.”

The Milsteins support AIPAC, StandWithUs, the Israeli-American Council, Hillel, Alpha Epsilon Pi, and many other Jewish organizations not only with their money but also with their time. Adam in particular works to coordinate the efforts of many Jewish organizations, helping them avoid duplicate effort and duplicate spending. All in all, Adam and Gila donate a large portion of their income, and half of their time, to their philanthropic efforts.

“Adam is strategic and he has become a tremendous role model for other philanthropists to follow,” says Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs. “He is not only generous and makes good work possible, he is a good listener who recognizes the strengths of each organization and helps bring organizations together for the greater good of Israel and the Jewish people.”

In fact, Adam and Gila have never stopped defending the people and the country they fought years ago to protect. “As philanthropists, Gila and I wake up each morning focused on two basic goals: strengthen the Jewish people and strengthen the Jewish state,” Adam said.

Never Again

Increased anti-Semitic vandalism and other incidents on college campuses, like the questioning of Rachel Beyda at UCLA, were thought to be outliers in the United States. The Jewish people have long faced discrimination in Muslim countries and in Europe, but many felt safe from overt anti-Semitism in the U.S.

Sentiments have changed as BDS infiltrates college campuses, winning over college students by aligning itself with progressive environmentalist and pro-LGBT groups. Instead of thinking deeply about the end goal of BDS — an end to the state of Israel — students have embraced a dangerous herd mentality. The Milsteins welcome discussion of possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they don’t hesitate to defend Israel against those who would see it disbanded or destroyed.

In addition to pledging their lives to protect their home and the Jewish people, they’re calling on others to take up their cause. “What we as from our members and from the people of the community,” Adam says, “is just ‘get active.’ Get active in charity. Support politicians so that your vote will be heard.”

Time and time again, the Jewish people have faced discrimination and annihilation all over the world. It’s something too many people are too eager to forget; but the Milsteins, their memories forged by what they faced in the Yom Kippur War so long ago, will not let complacence take hold.

“We have a responsibility to remind the world,” Adam explained, “that a connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel is unbroken and unbreakable.”

To ardent Zionists, leaving Israel for any reason is a betrayal of the Jewish people. In reality, the yerida has been good for Israel and continues to benefit the country in many ways. From the positive contributions of Israelis in the diaspora to the way Israelis abroad have brought significant investors back with them, it’s time to acknowledge that those who left aren’t yordim; they’re essential ambassadors for their homeland.

Not as Many Have Left as You Think

Despite certain rhetoric about how too many Jewish people have left Israel for other countries, Israel actually has fewer citizens living abroad than most other countries in the world. About 4 percent of the Israeli population, or 230,000 people, have moved to other parts of the world. Most countries, in contrast, lose about 8 percent of their population to emigration.

Israeli government ministries often claim that 1 million Israelis live abroad, but it’s a statement not supported by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Pew Research, which recently constructed a Global Religion and Migration Database, estimates that only 230,000 Israeli Jews have emigrated outside Israel.

BRINGING NEW BUSINESS BACK WITH THEM

Israel created a surplus of highly skilled and trained workers, second only to the U.S. In such a small country, it’s difficult to offer sufficient opportunities to these workers when so many overseas firms welcome them with open arms. Even when workers leave, however, many return and bring new business with them. The introduction of companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Alcatel-Lucent back into Israel — thanks to innovative Israelis who left and returned — has created new jobs within Israel to absorb more of Israel’s highly educated workforce, making it less tempting for future generations to leave.

Dov Frohman was born in Amsterdam, and his parents died in the Holocaust. After living in an orphanage, he moved to Tel Aviv and was adopted by relatives. He graduated from Technion and went to America, earning his master’s and doctoral degrees at U.C. Berkeley. He went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965 before transitioning to Intel in 1969.

After leaving Intel to teach in Ghana for a couple of years, Frohman returned in 1973. He helped Intel build a small chip design center in Haifa in 1974. Today, one in 10 Israelis works for Intel, thanks to the vision of someone who left and returned. The yerida isn’t always a brain drain; it’s often a speculative investment with massive ROI.

Israeli Expats: Strategic Ambassadors

The U.S. has by far the largest population of Israeli expats, many of whom hold dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship. Economy Minister Naftali Bennett has praised Israelis abroad, particularly those living in America, for their activism. He has called them “ambassadors” dedicated to strengthening the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

In Israel, Jewishness is automatic. Everything runs according to the Jewish calendar, and holidays are celebrated nationwide by schools, businesses, and private individuals. For many Israelis, integrating in the American Jewish community has been a struggle. “We were completely ignorant of the challenges of Israelis living in the diaspora,” says Adam Milstein, co-founder of the Israeli-American Council, “including the importance of connecting with Jewish life and Jewish education.”

Part of the problem is that Jewish life in the diaspora gets expensive. American Jews primarily build cohesion within their synagogues and around private Jewish day schools, and membership comes with significant costs. “American Jews already have an infrastructure to pass Judaism on to their children. Israelis have nothing,” Milstein told Aish.com. “They rarely belong to any synagogues because it costs a substantial amount of money to become members.”

Also, Israeli-Americans have a certain psychology which comes from “sitting on suitcases;” the idea that somehow, someday, they’ll eventually return home. Because they assume they’re headed home, they don’t work to build connections and community with American Jews — or with one another.

“They come to America to make a good living, and they’re living well, but they’re not involved in politics, not involved in charity. They’re not part of a community,” Milstein explains. “As the saying goes, they’re sitting on their suitcases. They don’t realize that they are actually sitting on a time bomb.”

FINDING THEIR VOICES

Milstein’s journey to reclaim his Jewish roots began when he realized his daughters, who were also born in Israel, had no desire to marry Jewish men. “At that point, I realized the only way maybe to correct my ignorance and mistake as an Israeli father was to get closer to Jewish life,” he told an AIPAC gathering, “and to demonstrate to my daughter that I was proud of my Jewish heritage and that our future as a Jewish family was of extreme importance to me.”

He started by attending Aish L.A. events, near Encino where he lives with his wife Gila, and by studying with Aish HaTorah Rabbi Dov Heller. As he strengthened his connection to his roots, he realized that Israelis in America had created no identity for themselves. “It would be more appropriate,” he says, “to call us Israeli-Americans. We grew up in Israel, most of us served in the Army, and our character was galvanized by the time we served in Israel.”

Both Adam and his wife Gila served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Adam marched across the Suez with General Sharon’s battalion during the Yom Kippur War, and Gila served as an officer in the medical corps. They came to the U.S. in 1981 so Adam could attend graduate school at the University of Southern California, and they became American citizens in 1986. Along with Israeli investor David Hager, Milstein built a lucrative commercial real estate partnership, but making money for money’s sake seemed like an empty pursuit. Hager, a Reform Jew, introduced him to his belief in ma’aser, or tithing, catalyzing Milstein’s own philanthropic journey.

The Israeli-American Council began as the Israeli Leadership Council in 2007. Founded after the second Lebanon War by Milstein and other prominent Los Angeles Israeli-Americans, the IAC became an umbrella organization for other Jewish charities in the area. Just as is common in Israel, many American Jews and Israeli-Americans had initiated philanthropy under the “my own NGO” model. The IAC, along with the Milstein Family Foundation, has helped multiple Jewish organizations share their resources, focus on their missions, avoid duplicate work, and get more done for Israeli-Americans and all Jewish people.

Milstein, Haim Saban, and other IAC members and backers have worked hard to educate politicians in Washington, D.C., about the real situation inside Israel. They’ve also worked to counter the influence of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on college campuses and in political discourse all over America. “As philanthropists, Gila and I wake up each morning focused on two basic goals,” Milstein says. “Strengthen the Jewish people and strengthen the Jewish state.”

SUPPORTING ISRAELI-AMERICAN KIDS

The Milsteins started their effort to bring Israeli-Americans together not with the Jewish religion, but with the Hebrew language. They founded Sifriyat Pijama B’America, a program providing Jewish storybooks, written in Hebrew, to young Jewish children in preschool and early elementary grades. In addition to sending books to individual families, the Milsteins have worked to get Sifriyat books into Jewish day schools. They hope that Israeli-American families will integrate with American Jews through participation in Jewish day schools even if they don’t join a synagogue.

Adam and Gila also hope introducing Israeli-American to reading Hebrew will help their parents feel a yearning for Jewish life. “We are trying to reach out to Israelis and embrace them and bring them back to Jewish life, Jewish education and the Jewish people. Otherwise they might be lost completely,” Adam explained in an interview. “We hope that once they read the books to their children, it will create an appetite for more Jewish life.

“What we are truly seeking to do,” he continued, “is to build communities with Jewish day schools as their focal point and help Israeli-Americans — especially those who are unaffiliated with Jewish institutions — to connect with Jewish life and Jewish education.” The Milsteins have also supported speaking day camps and BBYO, a program for Jewish student leaders in their teens.

HELPING YOUNG ADULTS

Building Jewish identity starts with young children, but the Milsteins also fight hard for the hearts and minds of young adults. Many Israeli-American and American Jewish young adults face challenges on college campuses that promote BDS ideology.

Rachel Beyda, a sophomore at UCLA, made news this year when UCLA student council members questioned her participation in Hillel and Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi. When Beyda was nominated for the judicial board, they asked whether her Jewish affiliations meant she could remain objective and treat all students equally. Although the students later apologized for their questions, Beyda’s situation is just one example of rising anti-Semitic sentiment on college campuses, which is encouraged by the herd mentality accompanying BDS.

To help Israeli-American young adults feel a connection to the homeland, the Milsteins support Taglit-Birthright Israel. Taglit sends Jewish young adults who have at least one Israeli parent on an all-expenses-paid journey to Israel. “When an Israeli-American comes on Birthright, the impact is probably five times more than the impact on Jewish-Americans,” Milstein told Jewish Journal. “The reason is simple — Israeli-Americans are connected to Israel already.”

In addition, the Milsteins support AIPAC’s Campus Allies program, which sends student leaders not of Jewish descent on a similar trip to Israel. “I think the Israeli people are best equipped to communicate the truth about Israel,” Milstein says. ““They know the Israeli people, they know that we have very high standards of human rights and freedom, they know the propaganda war of Hamas and Iran.”

Unbroken and Unbreakable

For Milstein and other Israeli expats, standing up for pro-Israel causes is their miluim. “We have always told everyone around that we are a strategic asset for the state of Israel,” Milstein says, “but now it’s become clearer and clear that we indeed are ambassadors for the state of Israel here in the United States.”

To help Israeli-Americans remember their connection to the homeland, the IAC has organized multiple Celebrate Israel events. Last year, they hosted events in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Pembroke Pines, Fla. Designed to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, festivals feature items like large Wailing Wall replicas and recreations of Jerusalem’s busy marketplace. Festivals draw thousands of Jewish people and non-Jews alike; the Los Angeles celebration alone welcomed over 15,000 last year.

The Milstein family might never return to living in Israel the way Dov Frohman did, but they still consider themselves both Israelis and Americans. And they’re taking a page from the American Jewish playbook by setting an example of philanthropy, both for Israelis and Israeli-Americans. “To have money just for the purpose of having more of it is completely meaningless,” Adam Milstein says. “Once we have financial freedom, we should use our means, our knowledge, our experience, and our conduct for the betterment of our people — Jewish people and the state of Israel.”

The Milsteins recently helped fund a documentary called “Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation,” which was designed to tell the story of the Jewish people and explain the current state of affairs in Israel. It’s part of a continued effort to educate voting adults and politicians about the realities in Israel, a project essential to the IAC’s mission. “What we ask from our members and from the people of the community is just ‘get active,’” Milstein says. “We don’t care whether it’s the American Jewish community or whether it’s AIPAC or whether it’s Zionists of America. Just get active in the political circle. Get active in charity. Support politicians so that your vote will be heard.”
Instead of hurting the Jewish state by leaving, expats who left and returned, like Frohman, and expats like the Milsteins, who stayed, both serve an important purpose. “We have a responsibility to remind the world that the connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel is unbroken and unbreakable.”

If you’ve dreamed of building a fortune as a real estate investor, you’re not alone. But if you think real estate is an easy way to get rich, you’ll be disappointed. According to real estate investor and attorney Bill Bronchick, 90 percent of people who attend a real estate investing seminar give up after three months. They just don’t have what it takes to succeed.

Investing in real estate requires capital, hard work, and significant business savvy. Many investors over-extend themselves through borrowing, and they have no cash flow for renovations and for day-to-day repairs. Also, many discover that returns on investment aren’t as rosy as they’d hoped.

Still, it’s quite possible to succeed in real estate investing. Just ask Adam Milstein, Barbara Corcoran, David Walentas, Jeff Sutton, and Donald Bren, who each have amassed personal fortunes and managed billions within their real estate portfolios. The lessons they learned apply to anyone who dreams of making money by becoming a real estate investor.

Adam Milstein, Hager Pacific Properties: Take the Long-Term Approach

Adam Milstein left Israel for American in 1981, with his wife Gila and his two daughters. He earned an MBA from the University of Southern California and took a job as a real estate agent. He thought he’d make enough to pay off his student loans and then return to Israel.

After about a year-and-a-half, Mistein met Israeli investor David Hager. He offered to list properties for Hager, but the investor didn’t bite. Over time, however, Milstein convinced Hager they should invest in properties together. They bought their first property on a 50-50 basis.

Today, Hager Pacific Properties manages a portfolio of over $1 billion in commercial real estate. Milstein, Hager, and their other managing partner, Rob Neal, pay cash for distressed or undervalued commercial properties and turn them into moneymaking vehicles. For example, Hager Pacific recently purchased a 16-building industrial building complex in McAllen and El Paso, Texas. They paid $17 million in cash for properties once estimated at $40 million.

Adam Milstein and his partners take the long-term approach. “The mistake many people young and old make is that they calculate their achievements, moneymaking, and net worth on a daily basis. They are sure to be disappointed by this approach,” Milstein explains. He and his partners purchased the Texas properties with a 10-year plan for development and leasing. Near-shoring trends — companies relocating manufacturing from China to close-by Mexico — means many businesses need to store raw materials for shipping to Mexico, or they need to store goods manufactured in Mexico to sell in the U.S.

Milstein and Hager had a productive partnership from the beginning. Where Hager was great at spotting opportunities and negotiating with owners, Milstein used his detail-oriented and analytical mind to execute their investment plans.

Instead of having a short-term plan for real estate riches built around some dream of a four-hour workweek, have a long-term plan for developing and maturing your portfolio. Once you have a plan, stick to it, learn from your mistakes, and give it everything you have. According to Milstein, it’s vital to think about the future outcomes of every decision made today. “Miracles are wonderful but cannot be relied upon,” Milstein says. “If there is one thing to increase the probability of scoring really big, it’s by working hard.”

Milstein never returned to Israel, but he views himself as an ambassador for Israel in America. The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation promotes a wide range of pro-Israel causes and programs designed to strengthen the American Jewish community.

Barbara Corcoran, Barbara Corcoran Venture Funding: Focus on People

As the second of 10 children, Barbara Corcoran had to fight to get noticed at home. She also had to succeed despite being severely dyslexic, a fact she tried to hide in her youth. After working a number of odd jobs, she started dating a real estate agent, and the two invested $1,000 in starting a real estate firm. Over the next 25 years, she built a company with nearly $5 billion in annual closings, 45 New York offices, and 2,150 employees.

Barbara Corcoran says she’s not great at managing money and looking at financial statements. What she excels at is understanding people and building relationships with people. “I realized from my very first customer that it had nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with how you got along with people,” Corcoran told Bankrate.com. “The rest was simply a matter of hanging out with them awhile and opening up a few doors. They would want to hang out with me, and if you can hang on to a customer, you’ll sell them something.”

In 2001, she sold The Corcoran Group to NRT and started marketing herself to media outlets as a real estate expert. Today, Corcoran is one of the beloved venture capitalists on the TV show “Shark Tank,” and she goes back to her people sense when choosing which entrepreneurs to back. “I say to myself, ‘What if we grow this into a $30 million business — is this person going to be thankful?’” she told Inc. Magazine. If the answer is “no,” and they aren’t great risk-takers and salespeople, Corcoran invests her money elsewhere.

David Walentas, Two Trees: Spot Neighborhoods With Big Potential

When David Walentas was a child, his mother worked two jobs but still couldn’t afford to raise David and his siblings. She sent them to live and work on nearby farms, which Walentas describes as being “something between an orphan and an indentured servant.” He got into the University of Virginia, dropped out for a while after losing his ROTC scholarship, and returned to earn a mechanical engineering degree. He took a job cleaning septic tanks for the military before drifting to Casablanca and then returning to the U.S. to earn his MBA.

Walentas couldn’t get a bank loan to start purchasing real estate, but he’d befriended Jeff Byers of the wealthy W.R. Grace family in Manhattan. The two launched Two Trees, named after Byers’ grandmother’s farm, and got $40,000 from friends and family to purchase a rent-controlled building in Harlem. Byers committed suicide a decade later, and their investors had no interest in working with only Walentas because they blamed business disputes between the partners for Byers’ death.

Walentas started dating his second wife Jane, who worked as an art director for Clinique, run by Ronald Lauder of Estée Lauder. He persuaded the Lauders to invest in a dilapidated neighborhood in Brooklyn called Fulton’s Landing because he thought expanding Wall Street firms would prefer Brooklyn instead of New Jersey as their businesses grew. “We got the whole neighborhood,” Walentas explained in a Forbes interview. “You had the freedom to create a neighborhood. In New York. And whatever you did with one building would add value to the others.”

Despite intense opposition from Byers’ friends in political office — they dubbed the neighborhood “Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” or “Dumbo” — Walentas finally got Mario Cuomo to relocate Department of Labor offices to lease space in a building and give him some extra cash. Finally, in 1997, Mayor Rudy Giuliani agreed to rezone Dumbo for residential development, and Walentas converted buildings from commercial to residential, one at a time, and sold one project to fund the next. Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, eventually invested in Dumbo, looking for buildings in need of rehabilitation. He paid 50 times what Walentas had paid 35 years prior.

If Walentas had given up on his vision for Dumbo, he wouldn’t be a billionaire today. In fact he no longer buys real estate in Dumbo. The skyrocketing prices have priced him out of the market.

Jeff Sutton, Wharton Properties: Never Take “No” for an Answer

One day, Jeff Sutton of Wharton Properties was working in his New York office building, and he heard a man screaming to the building secretary about a roof leak in his office. Sutton didn’t own the building, but he offered to help, calling some repairmen to come fix the roof.

The disgruntled man became an executive at Payless Shoes a few months later, and he called Sutton to talk about purchasing space for Payless Shoe Stores in New York. Sutton asked which building he wanted. The man pointed to a building that already had two tenants, but Sutton agreed to get the building for Payless. He asked the man for a lease contingent on his getting the building, and the lease helped Sutton finance the purchase. He ended up leasing 50 to 60 Payless stores in New York and purchase more than 18 buildings the same way.

When Sutton asks someone if they want to sell their building, he doesn’t back off when they say “no.” “You walk into a guy’s office and ask to buy his building. He says it’s not for sale. You could just go home, a lot of people do,” Sutton told The Real Deal, a New York Real Estate magazine. “It could be a very sentimental thing like his grandfather owned it and he wants it to be in the family forever. ‘No problem. Give me a 99-year lease for a dollar and I’ll give you the purchase price as if I bought it. In 100 years, your great grandson will get it back.’”

Sutton’s refusal to take “no” for an answer might seem aggressive, but it’s rooted in a philosophy of getting to know the people with whom he makes deals. “The more I truly cared about people the more money I made. Don’t come in there focused on what you want. That will come the minute you understand what they want.”

Donald Bren, Irvine Co.: Think Business Deals, Not Just Property

Donald Bren’s father, a Hollywood movie producer, developed buildings along L.A.’s Sunset Strip. His stepmother, Claire Trevor, was an Academy Award-winning actress and painter who nurtured his interest in painting and art. Young Donald worked for his father as a carpenter’s helper. He went into the Marines and returned, taking advantage of a post-World War II construction boom to build residential houses in Orange County.

After developing residential property and creating a plan for Mission Viejo, the Brens sold their company to International Paper for $34 million. Instead of buying more property, Donald took a risk and bought a 35-percent stake in Irvine Co., which owned some apartment buildings, offices, industrial buildings, and over 64,000 acres of undeveloped land in Orange County. Irvine Co. went on to essentially develop the entire town of Irvine, Calif., becoming a company worth almost $10 billion.

Bren bought out his partners slowly but surely, giving himself a bigger stake in the business. He also expanded his investment footprint to New York, acquiring a 97.3-percent stake in the MetLife Building. Irvine Co. is one of America’s largest companies, and it owns over 500 office buildings, 50 shopping centers, and over 50,000 apartments. Bren himself is the richest real estate developer in America, according to Forbes, with a net worth of about $15.2 billion.
To Bren, the secret of wealth isn’t just about buying and flipping properties. “What I learned from [my father] was that when you hold property over the long term, you’re able to create better values,” Bren told the LA Times, “and you have something tangible to show for it.”

Bren rarely gives interviews or makes public appearances. “I need to monitor and focus my time in a way that is productive for the company and for me. And if I feel that I’ve done the job well, that’s the satisfaction I get, not from doing interviews or being more public.” Although he doesn’t say much publicly about his journey, it’s obvious he thought strategically when building his empire, not only about property but also about buying into businesses with a controlling stake in valuable property.

Do You Have What It Takes?

Not every successful real estate makes it to the billion-dollar mark, but they all follow these important principles. They take the long view, put people first, seize opportunities, refuse to take “no” for an answer, and mix business savvy with an eye for great properties.

Most people associate American Jews with a devotion to philanthropy. In fact, Jewish people comprise five of six of the world’s top donors to charity, giving over $966 million to cherished causes. Compared to their counterparts in America, Israeli Jews give much less overall to philanthropic endeavors.

Israel hasn’t developed a strong philosophical culture for several important reasons. The country isn’t a bastion of old money; in fact, most of Israel’s wealthy citizens became rich during the tech boom. Unlike America, it isn’t full of long-established wealthy families with a history of service and philanthropy.

Also, high individual and corporate taxes, along with compulsory Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) service, makes people feel as though they’ve given their share. The Israeli tax code, unlike the American tax code, doesn’t offer attractive incentives for charitable giving.

Israel was founded on socialist ideas, which means Israelis pay high taxes and, in return, expect the government to provide most social services. Shifts in thinking have caused politicians to start cutting social service spending, and charities have stepped in to fill the void.

Unfortunately, public corruption cases involving charities, along with reports of NGO CEOs making more money than many business CEOs, has made the public suspicious of making donations. In Israel, most charitable donations come from individuals, not corporations. This disparity means a large, untapped market for philanthropic dollars in Israel’s business world. At the same time, the nouveau riche in Israel approach philanthropy with a business-oriented attitude. They show hands-on involvement with the charities they support, and they expect their money to deliver results.

Diaspora Jews, in America and also increasingly in Russia, have set a tremendous example in terms of philanthropy. In the U.S., philanthropy comprises 2.1 percent of GDP; in Israel, charitable giving amounts to just 0.74 percent. The good news is that philanthropy in Israel is on the rise, both from individuals and corporate social responsibility programs. These examples from the diaspora show what Israelis could accomplish by building a thriving philanthropic ecosystem.

Adam and Gila Milstein, United States

Adam Milstein came to the U.S. from Israel with his wife Gila in 1981. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1983, he became a commercial real estate agent and investor. Together with business partners David Hager and Rob Neal of Hager Pacific Properties, Milstein helps manage a commercial portfolio of over $1 billion. He stayed in America to find financial freedom, and his family never went home.

Even though Adam and Gila no longer live in Israel, they’re passionate ambassadors for the state of Israel. The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation supports over 100 pro-Israel causes and causes that strengthen the Jewish people. Milstein co-founded the Israeli-American Council (IAC) in 2007, an organization designed to bring a number of Israeli-American and Jewish charities under its umbrella. By helping these organizations avoid duplicate effort and share research, Milstein creates what he calls a philanthropic “force multiplier.”

Like the newly rich in Israel, Adam and Gila Milstein are hands-on philanthropists. They devote at least half of their time to charity along with a significant portion of their income. The Milstein Family Foundation founded and supports Sifriyat Pijama B’America, which puts free Hebrew storybooks for children into the hands of over 70,000 Israeli-American family members. The Milsteins also support Taglit-Birthright Israel, sponsoring trips to Israel for young Israeli-American adults.

The Milsteins’ latest focus involves preventing anti-Semitism from spreading on college campuses. Growing support for the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has grown on college campuses, where these organizations align themselves with progressive causes, like environmental preservation or LGBT rights.

As BDS has gained a foothold, anti-Semitic incidents at college campuses have significantly increased. In early 2015, Rachel Beyda, a UCLA student faced inappropriate questioning about her loyalty at her student council Judicial Board appointment hearing. She was asked whether her membership in Jewish organizations like Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi and Hillel interfered with her ability to treat all students fairly, and several students voted against her based on her cultural connections.

Increasing anti-Semitism has made the Milsteins more passionate than ever about giving time and money to pro-Israel causes. “We have always told everyone around that we are a strategic asset for the state of Israel, but now it’s becoming clearer and clearer,” Adam Milstein has said. “We have a responsibility to remind the world that a connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel is unbroken and unbreakable.”

Adam’s biggest contribution, however, is his ability to organize a wide range of charities, make them work together, and help them achieve greater results. “As an Israeli American, [Milstein has] done great work to bring more folks in that growing community into philanthropy and activism, and I’m sure we’ll see him continue to make a really meaningful impact,” said Josh Block, president and CEO of The Israel Project (TIP).

Leonid Nevzlin and Mikhail Friedman, Russia

Behind the Iron Curtain, many Soviet Jews stopped practicing the Jewish faith, but they retained strong ties to the Hebrew language and to their Jewish cultural roots. The NADAV Fund, founded by Russian Jewish oil industry businessman Leonid Nevzlin, and Genesis Philanthropy Group, run by a consortium of Mikhail Friedman and four other Russian Jewish donors, works tirelessly to help young Jews reconnect with their Jewish identity not only in Russia but also in many other corners of the diaspora.
Like the Milstein Family Foundation, Genesis has a strong presence on college campuses. The group recently founded the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry at Brandeis University, an organization providing scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students. Genesis isn’t strongly pro-Israel, and they support secular causes instead of donating to Jewish religious institutions. Nevzlin’s NADAV Fund, chaired by his daughter Irina, donated a great deal of money to Israeli organizations, including the Jewish Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. NADAV also partnered with the UJA-Federation of New York to open a global think tank, the Jewish Peoplehood Hub.

“The ideas having to do with Jewish peoplehood — with the importance of culture, literature, art, intellect in the preservation and pursuit of Jewish identity — are something that American Jews can learn from Russian Jews these days,” said Misha Galperin, former head of Jewish Agency International Development, the fundraising arm of the Jewish Federation of North America.

Galperin has also served as an advisor to Genesis. “The concept of Jewish identity and the sorts of things that helped Soviet Jews survive in a sort of post-assimilationist society are the sorts of lessons that are going to be invaluable to the American Jewish community.”

Stephen and Nancy Grand, United States

Many American Jews give to philanthropic causes, but not all of them focus on giving to Israel. Stephen and Nancy Grand, who gave $20 million to the American Technion Society in 2010, recently donated $10 million to Technion to open the Stephen and Nancy Grand Water Research Institute. Technion is Israel’s premier technology university, and it’s also Adam Milstein’s alma mater. The Grands’ giving has helped the institution raise $1 billion over the last 14 years, and the couple has also donated to Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.

Stephen Grand’s father served as president of the Detroit chapter of the American Technion Society. When he and his wife became philanthropists, supporting Technion was a natural first step. In 2005, Stephen was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and a drug developed by Technion scientists Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover saved his life. Hershko and Ciechanover would go on to win a Nobel Prize in 2004 for discovering how human cells tag aberrant proteins for destruction.

In addition to supporting Technion and the Weizmann Institute, the Grands have funded the Stephen and Nancy Grand Multiple Myeloma Translational Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “I discovered I had an advanced case of a cancer I had never even heard of. It was unbelievable. I never imagined it would happen to me,” Grand recalled. ““With all of the new knowledge developing around genetics, and the new scientific tools to design drugs that target the problem genes, progress is really only limited by time and the need for substantial investment.”

Haim and Cheryl Saban

Haim Saban was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1944. When he was 12, his family moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Israel. He learned to play bass and became a manager for Lions of Judah, an Israeli rock band. He moved to France to work as a music producer before moving to the United States, where he started producing television shows as founder of Saban Entertainment. After launching the children’s television show “Power Rangers” on Fox in 1993, he acquired the Family Channel, morphed it into Fox Family, and sold it to Disney for $5.3 billion.

Saban started donating money to the Democratic Party in the mid-1990s, and he has remained a close friend and advisor to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Sabans have given over $40 million to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Cheryl Saban, who has a doctoral degree in psychology, founded the Women’s Self-Worth Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing micro-financing opportunities to women in the U.S. and Israel.

In 2002, the Sabans founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy within the Brookings Institute. He has spoken candidly in support of Israel, telling The New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

“At the moment there is no sign of a crisis, but we must not be complacent,” Saban said in an interview with Haaretz. “The two pillars of the state are the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S., Dimona [the site of Israel’s nuclear reactor] and Washington. We must do all we can to maintain the alliance with America. A major crisis at the wrong time could be a disaster, a disaster.”

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson

Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-American wife Miriam, a medical doctor specializing in substance abuse treatment, have emerged as significant philanthropists backing pro-Israel causes. The Adelsons donated $12 million to the IAC in 2015, and they donate consistently to the Republican Party in support of Israel.

Philanthropy isn’t all political for the Adelsons; it’s also heavily influenced by Miriam’s work as a doctor. After completing two years of IDF service in Israel, Miriam graduated from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine. She served as chief internist in Rokach Hospital’s emergency department and worked as an associate physician in New York’s Rockefeller University. She developed significant expertise in substance abuse treatment and preventing HIV transmission between drug addicts.

After marrying Sheldon Adelson, Miriam founded a substance abuse center at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. In her new home of Las Vegas, she and her husband founded the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic. Almost every day, Miriam works at the research clinic, working with patients and studying how genetics predisposes certain people to becoming drug addicts.

“Treating one drug addict reduces his criminal activity, reduces his arrests, reduces his appearances in court, reduces his time sitting in prison, reduces his injecting drugs, reduces him being infected with HIV and Hepatitis C while sharing needles, and reduces his infecting others if he is already infected,” she told Fortune. “Saving a drug addict is the equivalent of saving about 20 people. By treating one person, we can save many lives.”

In addition to their support of the IAC and medical research, the Adelsons have given over $100 million to Taglit-Birthright Israel since 2007. Taglit’s mission is personal for Sheldon, whose father always wanted to visit Israel, but became ill and died before Sheldon and his siblings could afford the trip. “I don’t want one Jewish person not to be able to go to Israel because they are too old and too sick,” Adelson said.

Increasing Giving in the Homeland

Israeli’s newly wealthy tech pioneers are starting to build a culture of giving within their families and communities. Right now, the Israeli government’s lack of tax incentives for philanthropy makes little sense in light of its decreased funding for social services. Also, Israelis need to see that IDF service doesn’t absolve them of all they owe to the Jewish state. As Adam Milstein says, advocating for Israel is part of the miluim service, and Israelis can look at giving in the same way.