Canadian-Israeli Mega Donors
Marcel Adams and Sylvan Adams
Meir Marcel Abramovici (1920-2020) was born to a traditional Jewish family in Romania and became a leather tanner like his father. After three years in Nazi labour camps, he escaped to Turkey, and then to Israel, where he fought in the War of Independence. A few years later, he moved to Canada and got a job working at a Quebec tannery, where his boss told him to change his last name to “Adams”. Once he saved a little bit of money he began investing in real estate. In 1958, Adams became a full-time real estate investor and founded Iberville Developments. Today, the company has over 100 shopping centres, residential buildings, and industrial properties across Canada and the US. Before he passed away, Adams was the world’s second-oldest billionaire, and a noted philanthropist. He established Tel Aviv University’s Adams Institute for Business Management Information Systems and the Adams Super Center for Brain Research.
His son Sylvan Adams (b. 1958) took over Iberville Developments in 1990, and served as its CEO for the next 25 years, until making aliyah and settling in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, he took up professional cycling and in 2017 won the World Masters Championship in England. The following year, he opened the first indoor velodrome in Israel (and the entire Middle East). He gave 80 million shekels to bring the 2018 Giro d’Italia, one of cycling’s prestigious Grand Tours, to Israel, marking the first time that the tournament was held outside Europe. Adams has signed the Giving Pledge and is a huge philanthropist. He donated 100 million shekels to Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Medical Center in 2019, and financed a new children’s hospital at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon. Earlier this week, he announced $100 million to Ben-Gurion University in the Negev to “rebuild and strengthen” the south of Israel following the October 7 massacre. His foundation provides doctoral scholarships at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and funds the Nefesh b’Nefesh “Bonei Zion Prize” for immigrants to Israel who make a profound impact on the country. He also donated $5 million to SpaceIL to develop Israel’s nascent space program and put an Israeli spacecraft on the moon. Adams is still cycling, and earlier this year won the UCI Cycling World Championships in his age category.
Chanukah Begins Tonight – Chag Sameach!
Chanukah & the Light of Creation
Words of the Week
We must support the gentile poor along with the Jewish poor, and visit the gentile sick along with the Jewish sick, and bury the gentile poor along with the Jewish poor, for the sake of peace.
– Talmud, Gittin 61a
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (b. 1984) was born in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family with German, Austrian, and Polish ancestry. He excelled in high school, won multiple awards, and by the time he was ready to go to college, knew Hebrew, French, Latin, and Greek. Zuckerberg was first taught programming by his father, and later had a private tutor, who called him a “prodigy”. In his youth, he created an instant messaging app for his father’s dentistry (a year before AOL’s Instant Messenger came out), as well as a music player that learned its user’s listening preferences. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg went to Harvard to study computer science and psychology. He was a member of the Jewish fraternity AEPi. During this time, he made a number of programs, including one to coordinate with friends to choose the same classes, and another to rank people’s appearance (called Facemash) which was so popular it quickly crashed Harvard’s servers. In early 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, and soon dropped out of school to work on it. After recruiting some friends, he moved his team to Silicon Valley. It wasn’t long before he had offers to buy out Facebook, which was now sweeping college campuses across the country. Zuckerberg refused, not wanting to have people’s information controlled by “media corporations owned by conglomerates”. The company went public in 2012, valued at a record-setting $104 billion. Today, Facebook boasts 2 billion active users, and nearly $30 billion in revenue. The company also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has become a noted philanthropist. He donated over $100 million in 2010, before becoming America’s biggest charity donor in 2013 when, in a single act, he donated Facebook shares worth nearly $1 billion, making it the largest charitable gift ever. He has since pledged to donate 99% of his wealth. One of his main projects is to bring internet access to the billions of people that still do not have it. Zuckerberg has been ranked first in a list of the “Top 100 most influential people of the Information Age”. In recent years, he has taken a greater interest in both politics and religion. Last December, someone asked “Aren’t you an atheist?” to which he responded: “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.” In May, he gave a commencement speech at Harvard (which finally awarded him an honourary degree years after he dropped out) and concluded with a traditional Hebrew Mi Sheberach blessing, stating that he always recited it when faced with challenges. Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook, with a salary of $1. There have been rumours that he is planning to run for president in 2020.