When Israeli women paid a distinct and devastating price during Hamas’s October 7 terror attack and in the resulting war in Gaza, Israeli feminist organizations leapt into action—some with the financial backing of the Hadassah Foundation.

“Our hotline volume doubled with women asking for help,” said Tal Hochman, CEO of the 40-year-old Israel Women’s Network, whose current foundation grant began last year. On top of the trauma of mass rape, kidnapping and murder, “their husbands were called up from the reserves, and childcare and schools closed. But women were still expected to go to work.”

Lobbying and legal advocacy are at the heart of the network’s mission of promoting gender equality. Within days of the attacks, Hochman’s team had drafted a position paper—co-signed by some 40 Israeli women’s rights organizations—urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government to promote policies to meet women’s wartime needs and demanding greater female representation in government.

Such advocacy exemplifies the mission of the Hadassah Foundation to advance gender equity in both the United States and Israel. The foundation was established in 1998 with a $10 million endowment from Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, to extend Hadassah’s reach through novel partnerships and support for impactful programs. 

That mission has taken on new urgency since October 7. Within days, the foundation, which operates as an independent nonprofit with its own board of directors, made a $36,000 emergency grant to the Hadassah Medical Organization for “the extraordinary work they were doing in leading trauma care,” said Stephanie Blumenkranz, the foundation’s director since 2019. An additional $30,000 in emergency grants went to organizations addressing Israelis’ immediate needs, including $10,000 for Jewish Federations of North America.

After the attack, the foundation’s chair, Audrey Weiner, announced a partnership with Elluminate, a Jewish women’s philanthropic initiative. The two groups created a portfolio of 10 American Jewish women’s funds “to address the critical issue of advocacy around ‘the day after’ the war, and the need to have women at all the decision-making tables in Israel,” Weiner said in an email from Israel, where she and Blumenkranz were leading the foundation’s March solidarity mission.

With funding coming from its 18-person board, 74 alumni board members and other donors, the foundation’s annual awards have grown substantially since Blumenkranz became director—from $500,000 a few years ago to $650,000 last year and a projected $750,000 next year. In its first 25 years of operation, the foundation has supported 105 organizations: 64 in Israel and 41 in the United States.

Grantees have run the gamut from grassroots outfits to august institutions, and they cater to myriad constituencies—from Arab teachers and progressive rabbis in Israel to LGBTQ+ Jews, Israeli Bedouins and domestic violence victims. 

In Israel, grantees have included Isha L’Isha-Haifa Feminist Center, Israel’s oldest grassroots feminist organization; Olim Beyahad: Rising Up Together, which integrates Ethiopian Israeli college graduates into the workforce; the Rackman Center, a feminist legal and policy institute at Bar-Ilan University; and QueenB, a group dedicated to increasing female representation in high tech.

American grantees have been similarly diverse, including teen initiatives like jGirls+ magazine, college-based organizations such as UCLA Hillel and Yeshivat Maharat, the first Orthodox seminary to ordain women.

Roni Schwartz, HWZOA’s liaison to the foundation, observed that women’s rights have been increasingly imperiled over the past several years, giving new urgency to the foundation’s mission. She cited rising antisemitism and rollbacks of reproductive rights in America and, in Israel, a government that increasingly cedes power over women’s lives to all-male religious courts.

“Over the past 25 years,” Schwartz said, “we’ve helped build and nourish a powerful network of Israeli and Jewish feminist organizations. Our responsibility now is to help them succeed by ensuring they get the resources they need to take on today’s enormous challenges.”

About five years ago, according to Blumenkranz, the foundation consciously altered its focus from bolstering women—through initiatives like leadership training—to changing the culture itself so that it is more equitable.

“There’s nothing in women that’s missing,” Blumenkranz explained of the paradigm shift. “Rather, there are things put together incorrectly in society. Bringing people together to analyze how it got that way, and what we can do to address it, has been a changing factor in the work we do.”

Blumenkranz said the foundation has been gratified to see how organizations it nurtures have risen to meet post-October 7 challenges.

For example, Moving Traditions, a longtime American grantee, used its expertise around the teen mental health crisis to address youth anxiety over rising antisemitism and the war in Israel. Moving Traditions CEO Shuli Karkowsky quickly updated the feminist-infused wellness curricula used in 200 synagogues, camps and day schools nationally with prompts “to address classroom dynamics and a basic framework for understanding the war,” she said, “and to give teens tools to untangle their complex feelings about this conflict.”

In Israel, Forum Dvorah, an organization that champions women’s participation in national security affairs, has lobbied to involve more women in decision-making around the war in Gaza and the hostage negotiations, and to open up more combat positions in the Israel Defense Forces to women.

“We’re funding them because we know they can be so much more,” Blumenkranz said. She extended that sentiment to all the foundation’s grantee that are, she said, “creating a world that’s more equitable and raising women up.”

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Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.