Four Cities, One Benefactor: Uri Poliavich From the Ground Up

Rome: A Hundred-Year-Old School Gets a Future

Rome's Jewish school has stood for roughly a century, long enough to be woven into the heritage of one of Europe's most storied Jewish communities. Its history is matched by an opportunity to create learning environments that meet the needs of today's students: cramped space, outdated classrooms, facilities that can be improved to better serve its roughly 1,000 pupils.

The renewal now under way arrived through a partnership between two organizations, the Yael Foundation, which Uri Poliavich co-founded, and the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. The collaboration is deliberate in its division of labor, pooling resources, planning experience and educational expertise, and deliberate in its goal: to modernize thoroughly while preserving the building's historic character. For the families involved, the abstractions of international philanthropy are reduced to something concrete, larger, more functional and safer spaces where their children can learn for decades.

Rome also illustrates the first rule of how the Yael Foundation operates anywhere: it does not arrive alone. It partners with institutions communities already trust, and it joins efforts only where values align.

Nuremberg and Beyond: Rebuilding German Jewish Education

Germany hosts one of the more remarkable stories of Jewish communal revival in Europe, and education is its backbone. Across the country, the Yael Foundation supports a lattice of local institutions, each grant fitted to its city: educational programs for children in Nuremberg, funding for the Jewish community high school in Munich, informal education in Frankfurt, identity-strengthening programs in Dresden, children's projects in Berlin, Hebrew school programs in Hanover, initiatives in Bremen.

The pattern matters more than the list. No two grants are identical because no two communities are; requests originate locally, and support flows to the specific needs each community identifies. Teachers gain training and materials, buildings gain repairs and equipment, and institutions gain the resources and capacity to plan for the future.

Behind that pattern stands the biography of the man funding it. Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1981, Uri Poliavich remade his life at 14, when the family put down roots in Israel. Uri Poliavich knows from the inside what it means for a child to maintain a sense of identity across borders, and what a difference an anchoring institution makes.

Gothenburg: Proof That Small Communities Count

Sweden illustrates the particular importance of sustaining Jewish education in smaller communities. Its Jewish communities are small, and that can make it more challenging to sustain educational opportunities, including Sunday school, cultural materials, or after-school programs, however committed everyone involved may be.

Gothenburg shows the response. The Yael Foundation funds the Sunday classes and educational programs the community could not sustain alone; in Stockholm, it backs an after-school center for children. While the investments are modest by international standards, they are transformative locally: regular classes happen, modern textbooks arrive, children gather in welcoming spaces, and a small center becomes a hub of cultural life where the next generation learns to carry its heritage with pride.

A philanthropy focused solely on scale or visibility might overlook Gothenburg; the numbers are too small for headlines. For Uri, its inclusion is a signature, evidence that the operating principle is need, not spectacle.

The Network Behind the Cities

The four cities are samples from a much larger map:

The connective tissue is a program architecture that repeats wherever the Yael Foundation established by Uri Poliavich works. Core grants stabilize budgets and ease tuition for families. Renovation funding readies classrooms each September. Community grants involve parents and alumni. Teachers, principals, and specialists move through training programs, a leadership course run internationally and a summit held each year. Children from across the map meet each summer, including 600 participants from 23 countries in 2026, at a camp operating in eight languages. Annual awards spotlight excellence so successful approaches can be shared across.

The Man the Cities Rarely See

Communities experience the Yael Foundation; few experience the founder. The distance is by design. Poliavich, whose career before philanthropy was spent building international technology ventures, has structured the Yael Foundation the way he structured his companies: strong local partners, continuous dialogue with the schools rather than remote directives, measurable long-term goals, and teams trusted with freedom and held to results.

The stated philosophy of Uri Poliavich explains the rest. Education, he argues, is the single investment whose returns cross generations, and philanthropy done seriously must be built as systematically as any enterprise, with strategy, transparency, and patience measured in decades. He has emphasized long-term, sustained investments over one-time donations he set aside early. He co-founded the Yael Foundation with his wife in 2020, from headquarters in Jerusalem, precisely to build a lasting structure for that work.

What the Ground View Reveals

Seen from above, Uri Poliavich is a successful entrepreneur with an expanding charitable ledger. Seen from Rome, Nuremberg, Gothenburg and Limassol, he is something more particular: the reason a century-old school gets its next century, a revived community gets its teachers, a small congregation keeps its Sunday classes and an island gets its first great Jewish campus. The totals are impressive. The cities make them tangible.