Jewish Fund

Jewish Fund

The Jewish Fund was established in 1996 as a supporting organization of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, capitalized with the $55 million in proceeds from the sale of Sinai Hospital of Detroit. The hospital had served as a community anchor for the city's Jewish population before its sale to the Detroit Medical Center, and the Fund was designed to preserve that mission in grantmaking form. Jeff Schlussel chairs the board; former board chair Michael Eizelman guided the Fund through earlier investment cycles. The organization memorializes Robert Sosnick, widely credited as the visionary behind the transaction that created the Fund, through an annual Sosnick Award recognizing community leadership. The investment portfolio, estimated by Altss at roughly $59 million, is unusual among endowments of its size for its emphasis on secondary-market transactions. The Fund maintains explicit exposure to commodity strategies and secondaries funds, bypassing the primary fundraising cycle in favor of purchasing existing LP interests at discounts. This liquidity-providing posture suggests a mandate to capture immediate yield rather than wait through traditional private-market J-curves. The Fund's operating expenses and grant budgets are funded through portfolio returns; programmatic grants focus on healthcare access, mental health services, and social welfare within both Detroit's Jewish community and the broader metro area. The Fund operates from a commercial building it owns at 6735 Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Hills and holds an additional residential property on Franklin Park Drive in Franklin, Michigan. Margo Pernick leads a lean team as Executive Director, with deep ties to Michigan's philanthropic infrastructure — she has served as a trustee of the Council of Michigan Foundations. The Fund runs an active Teen Board, a philanthropic education vehicle that introduces high school students to grantmaking processes and Jewish communal values. In 2024, Jeff Schlussel assumed the board chair role, succeeding a leadership lineage that traces directly to the Fund's originators. The structural differentiator is the endowment's origin: health-conversion foundations are uncommon nationally, and virtually none of this vintage deploy a secondaries-heavy, commodity-tilted investment policy. The Jewish Fund operates with no ongoing fundraising obligation, a captive physical real estate base, and a permanent connection to the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — which provides back-office and governance infrastructure while preserving the Fund's separate endowment identity.