Charitable giving to and within Israel has not fallen since the surge that followed October 7, but has kept rising, JGive founder and CEO Ori Ben-Shlomo said on The Deep Dive this week.
Ben-Shlomo said the platform expects to finish this year at more than four times its pre-war volume, with over 250,000 Israeli and Diaspora donors giving about NIS 500 million.
"It changed society," he said. He added that Israelis now see civil society organizations as a "must-have" rather than a nice extra. Ben-Shlomo, a lawyer who was general counsel at a major Israeli media group, founded JGive after serving in Gaza as a reservist during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. There, he said, he saw how much donated goodwill was lost to poor coordination.
On October 7, as calls came in from New York, Los Angeles and London, JGive helped thousands of charities raise emergency funds. It also set up a national emergency fund whose leadership included a former Israel Air Force commander and a former Supreme Court justice. The fund began with basic needs, such as food, clothing and medication for evacuees from the kibbutzim, including Holocaust survivors, before moving on to education and rehabilitation.
The way Diaspora Jews give has also changed, Ben-Shlomo said. Their grandparents' generation wrote checks to large institutions. Younger donors want to give "without the middleman," to specific causes they have researched themselves, and increasingly alongside Israelis rather than simply to them. "Israel is not a young state," he noted. "We're close to 80." He said young people are now among JGive's top donors, the same group that major charities had once told him they could not reach.
Israeli elections two weeks away
With Israel's elections two weeks away, the conversation turned to Diaspora Jews who feel tied to the country's future but cannot vote. Ben-Shlomo argued that giving is "the best way" for them to have a say, and said it does more to shape the country than politics does. "Politics divides people, and giving connects people," he said. He also addressed the strain that rising antisemitism has placed on Jewish communities abroad, which must fund their own security while still supporting Israel. He said those donors have shifted the balance toward their own communities without stopping their support for Israel, and argued that the Israeli government and Israeli donors should now help Diaspora communities in return.
Ben-Shlomo described working with Israel's Tax Authority to introduce donor-advised funds, a tool familiar in the US, and to allow donations of stocks and other assets, which he called "a game changer." He said further reform is still needed, including ceilings on tax benefits for major donors. He framed the larger task as building what he called Israel's "fourth power." After defense, the economy and technology, he said, the country now needs the strength of a society "that makes sure no one is left behind," built from the ground up, much like the start-up nation.
Asked whether he is optimistic about the next generation, he answered with the story of a reserve officer badly wounded in Lebanon who, while still in rehabilitation, organized a campaign for a fellow patient.