The Yael Foundation works from a clear premise: Jewish identity grows strongest through connection. For a child, connection is the foundation everything else is built on. It is how they come to understand that they belong to something far bigger than themselves. Through it comes strength, a sense of self, and comfort. A strong Jewish identity provides the reassuring knowledge of belonging to a network far wider than immediate family, school, or neighborhood.
For educators, parents, and community leaders, connection is no less essential. In a community built on personal relationships and shared action, deep mutual learning becomes possible, enriching everyone through new perspectives and turning separate institutions into a single learning community.
This principle runs through the foundation’s programs. The Yael Foundation supports a network of 144 institutions across 45 countries and 101 cities, reaching 29,362 children by funding and strengthening educational institutions already active in their communities. What links those institutions is not a single curriculum but a connection in which students, teachers, and school leaders are tied to peers facing similar conditions in other countries.
Building a strong Jewish future depends on recognizing the role shared experience plays in forming those bonds, and the Yael Foundation puts that idea into practice through its educational initiatives.
Yael Camp: where a global Jewish network takes shape
Yael Camp is one of the clearest expressions of the connection the Yael Foundation works to build. Each year the program brings together students from more than 20 countries to share in immersive, engaging and joyful Jewish experience.For many participants, it is a first encounter with Jewish identity in a global context: they meet peers from very different backgrounds and find common ground across them.
Returning to their own schools, campers carry that wider perspective with them, and educators frequently report greater confidence and deeper engagement in Jewish life afterward. The Yael Foundation positions the camp as an entry point into a lasting international network rather than a single summer event.
Yael Awards: recognizing models worth sharing
The Yael Awards, the Yael Foundation’s annual recognition program, surface the programs other schools can learn from. They are open to schools across 45 countries and serve as a global program promoting excellence in Jewish education.
Recent recognition has highlighted programs that bring together students from a wide range of backgrounds in a shared setting, designed so that differences connect rather than divide, with identity strengthened and every child included regardless of background or level of observance. For the foundation, this recognition spotlights a model that others across the network can study and adapt.
Professional learning across the Yael Foundation
Connection also shapes how the Yael Foundation supports the adults who run its schools. School leaders from across the foundation’s community recently joined a session on how small, practical habits shape a school’s culture. The discussion focused on turning ideas into everyday practice and gave educators concrete tools for strengthening well-being, resilience, and long-term growth in their schools.
Sessions like these extend the logic that runs through the camp and the awards: progress comes from shared learning, and the role of the foundation is to connect the people doing the work so that what succeeds in one school becomes available to others.
Building for the long term
The Yael Foundation also invests in the physical institutions that hold communities together. It funds the construction and renovation of Jewish community buildings and educational facilities in cities including Riga, Faro, Malta, Copenhagen, Kyiv, and Tbilisi. Looking ahead, the organization is developing the Yael Schools network, with two flagship campuses in Limassol and Lisbon, both set as benchmarks for educational excellence in emerging Jewish communities. These projects extend the same principle into permanent form: durable institutions that anchor connection in place.
A connected Jewish future
Taken together, these programs describe how the Yael Foundation understands its task. Strong Jewish identity is built through belonging, and belonging is built through shared experience that crosses borders. By connecting students through Yael Camp, recognizing models through its awards, building permanent institutions through Yael Schools, and linking educators through professional learning, the foundation turns a set of separate grants into a single international community.
That community is the foundation’s central contribution. Across 45 countries, the Yael Foundation supports schools that share funding, teaching methods, and leadership training, and that increasingly share a sense of common purpose. The foundation holds a consistent position: shared experience is what holds a global community together, and connection is what gives the next generation its strength.