Israel's Giving Boom Fills Gaps Left by the State

Israelis and Diaspora Jews are on track to give about NIS 500 million this year through one platform—more than four times its pre-war volume. JGive founder and CEO Ori Ben-Shlomo said more than 250,000 donors will have contributed by year's end, and charitable giving has kept climbing since the surge after October 7.

The numbers show what civil society now carries. “It changed society,” Ben-Shlomo said on The Deep Dive. Israelis now see civil society organizations as a “must-have,” not a nice extra.

The Emergency Response

On October 7, calls came in from New York, Los Angeles and London. JGive helped thousands of charities raise emergency funds and established a national emergency fund. A former Israel Air Force commander and a former Supreme Court justice joined its leadership.

The fund first addressed the most basic needs: food, clothing and medication for people evacuated from the kibbutzim, including Holocaust survivors. Later, it expanded its work to education and rehabilitation. The shift from handing out blankets to funding recovery shows how long the aftermath of a single day can last for displaced families.

Ben-Shlomo knows the coordination problem firsthand. A lawyer and former general counsel at a major Israeli media group, he founded JGive after serving in Gaza as a reservist during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. He said he saw how poor coordination caused donated goodwill to go to waste. Twelve years on, he’s building the machinery to prevent that.

A Changing Donor Base

The donors themselves are changing. Ben-Shlomo said the grandparents’ generation wrote checks to large institutions. Younger donors want to give “without the middleman” to specific causes they’ve researched, increasingly alongside Israelis rather than simply to them.

“Israel is not a young state,” he said. “We’re close to 80.” Young people are now among JGive’s top donors, he said, although major charities had previously told him they couldn’t reach that group.

With Israeli elections two weeks away, Ben-Shlomo spoke to Diaspora Jews who feel connected to Israel’s future but can’t vote. He called giving “the best way” for them to have a say, and said it does more to shape the country than politics. “Politics divides people, and giving connects people,” he said.

There’s strain on the other side of that relationship. Ben-Shlomo discussed rising antisemitism and the pressure on Jewish communities abroad to fund their own security while still supporting Israel. Those donors, he said, have shifted the balance toward their own communities without ending their support for Israel. He argued that Israel’s government and donors should now help Diaspora communities in return.

Reform and the Gap Between Need and State

Ben-Shlomo said he worked with Israel’s Tax Authority to introduce donor-advised funds, familiar in the United States, and allow donations of stocks and other assets. He called that “a game changer.” He said further reform is needed, including ceilings on tax benefits for major donors.

His larger goal is what he called Israel’s “fourth power.” After defense, the economy and technology, he said, the country needs a society “that makes sure no one is left behind,” built from the ground up like the start-up nation.

Asked if he was optimistic about the next generation, Ben-Shlomo told the story of a reserve officer badly wounded in Lebanon who organized a campaign for another patient while still in rehabilitation.

Why This Matters: A fourfold jump in giving shows how much of the work of caring for displaced and traumatized Israelis now falls to private generosity rather than the state. That’s a measure of how deep the damage from October 7 and the war that followed has run, and how many people are still waiting for help. The call for tax reform, including ceilings on benefits for major donors, raises the question of who gets served when philanthropy takes the place of public provision. Giving can bind communities together, as Ben-Shlomo argues. But no donor network can replace the political decisions that determine whether Israelis, or anyone living amid this conflict, can eventually count on security that doesn’t depend on emergency funds.