Interviews with Jewish communal leaders tend to run on rails. The communications person, the polished quotes, the photographer, and six months later nothing has moved.
Gary Torgow shows up alone and speaks so softly you lean in.
Several meetings with the Jewish Federations of North America chairman over the past few years leave the same impression. He hosts people from across Detroit's Jewish community in his home, Orthodox and Reform, big donors and young couples, and somehow all of them have a real relationship with him. People call him a mensch, and in that world the word is not handed out for free. What they mention next, usually with some wonder, is that this soft-spoken man can get almost anyone in America on the phone. You will never hear that from him, and you will never see a photo of the meeting.
He rarely gives interviews. When he does, it's because he wants to move something for the Jewish people, not because he wants to be seen. So when he agreed to answer questions from The Jerusalem Post, the real question was what he wanted to move.
It turns out to be big. Over the past year, Torgow has lined up money for Jewish day schools from two governments at once.
Washington and Jerusalem
The American side first. The tax law US President Donald Trump signed in July 2025 created something that has never existed before: a federal tax credit for scholarship donations. Starting in January 2027, any taxpayer can give up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization and deduct every dollar of it from their federal tax bill. The scholarships go to families earning under 300% of their area's median income, which covers most day school families.
JFNA is building a national scholarship organization to point that money at Jewish schools. That build is not Torgow's alone; the day-to-day operation runs through the organization's president and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, and the division of labor between them is the classic one done right: the chairman opens the doors, and the professional staff builds what walks through them.
It's worth being precise about what this is, because it is not charity. The $1,700 is money the taxpayer already owes the government. The credit simply lets them decide that it educates a child instead. Nobody is asked to give anything, only to redirect, and that distinction is the whole ballgame: appeals for generosity have limits, but this one asks for a signature.
"This should be an easy victory for education," Torgow said, "by utilizing taxes that are owed directly to the Federal government, and shifting them legally into the coffers of education for all of our children."
Then, on June 28, the Israeli cabinet unanimously approved a NIS 200 million first-year plan to strengthen Jewish education in the Diaspora, in partnership with JFNA. Torgow and Fingerhut sat in the cabinet room together for the vote. Pause on that, because it quietly reverses a century of Jewish geography. For a hundred years the money flowed from the Diaspora to Israel. This is money flowing the other way, from a country at war, on the theory that a Jewish school in New Jersey is now a strategic asset.
The government's own numbers explain why: 1.8 million Jewish school-age children live in the United States. Only a small fraction of them sit in a Jewish classroom, and that fraction is overwhelmingly Orthodox. The real target of both funding streams is the majority of American Jewish families who never seriously priced a day school, because everyone already knew the answer.
Anyone who has covered cabinet decisions about the Diaspora knows that most of them die somewhere between the press release and the budget. This one has a real partner on the other side of the ocean, and it did not come out of nowhere. Torgow chaired the steering committee of Mosaic United, the government's earlier Diaspora vehicle, so he knew his way around these corridors long before the vote.
The awkward part
There's a problem with the American money, and the Post put it to him directly. The tax credit is a school choice program from a Trump law that most American Jews opposed. Teachers' unions hate it. Two Democratic senators want it repealed. States have to opt in, and so far the map mostly follows party lines, though Colorado's Jared Polis joined and New York's Kathy Hochul says she will. JFNA is lobbying Democratic governors. So how do you ask liberal Jews to claim a Trump win?
"We aren't asking anyone to claim victory; we only ask that they embrace our shared responsibility," he said. The law, he insisted, "reflects the support for education across the political spectrum."
Everyone who has sat through a federation gala knows that answer. Usually it's a dodge. With Torgow it's less clear, because he has spent his whole life on both sides of lines other people don't cross. He's the Orthodox yeshiva president who chaired the NAACP's Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner and holds its Lifetime Achievement Award.
He raised $250 million for Detroit neighborhoods while running Yeshiva Beth Yehudah, the city's largest Jewish day school. Maybe he actually believes the aisle is crossable, because he keeps crossing it.
Fingerhut, who has partnered with him since he took the chair a year ago, said at the time that the federation system "could not be more fortunate" to have Torgow at the helm at a moment of historic antisemitism and surging Jewish engagement. A year in, the assessment is holding up.
What's driving him is not subtle. "In light of the significant rise in antisemitism," he said, "it has become more clear every day that a critical antidote to this terrible scourge is by providing our next generation with the tools to stand as proud, educated and engaged Jewish citizens."
He's right about the antidote. And it's worth saying honestly that the tuition crisis is not new. Every commission and task force has named it for forty years, and the wealthiest Jewish community in history never fixed it. Whether this is the moment that changes, nobody knows yet. But it is the first time federal money, Israeli money, and a chairman who can work both systems have shown up in the same year.
The stipend from Heaven
Asked what he would tell a parent looking at the tax credit for the first time, he didn't offer numbers. He offered the Talmud. Tractate Beitzah teaches that a person's income is set each year on the High Holy Days, except for what he spends on Shabbat, the festivals, and his children's Torah education. That spending, Torgow said, is "a fully additional stipend from Heaven." Every dollar spent on Jewish education "will be fully reimbursed by the Almighty."
He has written two books, and neither is about him. One is about his grandfather, M. Manuel Merzon, who came to America from Russia alone at 16. The other is about Rabbi Avrohom Abba Freedman, the Detroit rabbi he learned Torah with for 30 years. Asked what that says about how he understands leadership, he gave the lesson those two men left him: "None of the important work we will do in our lives is for or about ourselves." He even hid his grandfather inside the name of his first bank. Talmer. Merzon.
And what needs to be true when his grandchildren ask what he did as chairman at this moment in Jewish history? He answered with two Hebrew words before anything else: Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of God's name.
The date he chose
In the cabinet room on June 28, after the vote, Torgow told the ministers how this actually began. He first pressed Netanyahu on Israeli investment in Diaspora Jewish education at a private meeting on July 5, 2022. He picked the date deliberately: the sixth of Tammuz, the yahrzeit of the prime minister's brother Yoni. Then he waited. It took four years, a war, and the worst wave of antisemitism in living memory for the idea to come back around the table.
The Government Press Office photographed him that morning, standing among the ministers beside the prime minister. It is one of the few pictures of him you will find anywhere.
He didn't share it. He never does.