Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation has announced a new round of grants to the American Jewish community.
The new grants brings the total amount disbursed to $18 million since the creator of “Schindler’s List” established the fund in the fall of 1994.
The new commitments range in size from $440 to the Hillside, N.J., Public Library to purchase books on Jewish topics, to $1.6 million to Brandeis University in Massachusetts to create a program for teen-agers, linking their secular interests to studies in Jewish values and traditions.
Other major gifts included $647,500 to the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York to launch the first-ever national Jewish documentary film fund; $345,000 to three New York-based organizations to provide financial and social assistance to Holocaust survivors in Israel and the United States; and $100,000 to My Jewish Discovery Place in Los Angeles to develop traveling exhibits of its hands-on children’s museum.
Smaller grants, ranging between $5,000 and $75,000, went to such innovative projects as launching the first “virtual” Jewish community on the Internet in San Francisco; the Florida Jewish Theater in Miami to treat public school students to one of its plays; and Operation Understanding for its black-Jewish teen program in Washington, D.C.
Since its inception, the Righteous Persons Foundation has authorized grants to 70 organizations and institutions, most of them based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Other projects supported by the foundation were located in Cincinnati, Buffalo, N.Y., Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Haven, Conn., and Philadelphia.
In its two largest grants, the foundation previously committed $6 million to Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to videotape the testimonies of up to 150,000 Holocaust survivors, and $3 million to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.
In announcing the new grants, Spielberg said that “Even more than the dollar amounts, [these grants] are significant for what they can stimulate and achieve for Jewish educational and cultural life to bring the Jewish community confidently into the 21st century.”
The Righteous Persons Foundation is capitalized entirely by Spielberg’s personal profits from the Academy Award-winning “Schindler’s List” – a film that even its maker expected to lose money.
The figures are still not final, but the foundation expects to disburse close to $40 million before it closes its books in three to four years.
The foundation has already processed over 3,000 grant applications, with new ones coming in at the rate of 300 a month.
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