A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
American Friends of Tel Aviv University
New York philanthropists Jon and Mindy Gray gave $125 million through their Gray Foundation to address Israel’s physician shortage, educate a new generation of physicians and other health-care professionals, boost medical research, and give more underserved students a chance to become doctors.
The gift will support a range of programs in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, including the construction of a new dormitory and new classrooms and research facilities, and efforts to modernize the medical and dentistry schools. The donation will also back scholarships for students from underrepresented groups, the creation of a memorial for victims of the Hamas attacks in Israel that took place in October 2023, and research aimed at halting hereditary cancers.
Jon Gray is president and CEO of the Blackstone Group, an investment firm in New York, and chairman of the hotel corporation Hilton Worldwide. Mindy Gray helped start New York City Kids RISE, a nonprofit that provides scholarships and other aid to families and schools.
The couple are billionaires who have given extensively to research and clinical programs aimed at improving the treatment and prevention of hereditary cancers, and efforts that provide education, health care, and enrichment opportunities to underserved New York youths. They have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times in recent years.
St. John’s University
Retired KKR partner William Janetsche gave $32.5 million to pay for the construction of a new basketball practice facility for the men’s and women’s basketball teams. Janetsche is giving $25 million of the total to pay for the new building, which is scheduled for completion in 2027, and $7.5 million to support scholarships.
Janetsche is a retired partner and chief financial officer of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, a private equity firm headquartered in New York. Prior to joining KKR, he was a tax partner at the accounting giant, Deloitte & Touche. He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s in 1984 and serves as chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees.
Janetsche is a guest lecturer at St. John’s and partner in its Executive-in-Residence program, which provides undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to participate in real-world business consulting with companies and nonprofit organizations.
USC Shoah Foundation
Mickey Shapiro gave $30 million to support the foundation’s efforts to preserve the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations. The money will be used for general operations, endowment, and the ongoing collection and preservation of thousands of Holocaust survivor testimonies from around the world that are at risk of degrading and disappearing from public use.
Shapiro founded the M. Shapiro Real Estate Group, in Farmington Hills, Mich., and serves on the Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors and executive committee. His parents, Sara and Asa Shapiro, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States after World War II and in 1952 they founded ASA Builders Supply, a Walled Lake, Mich., construction company. Sara Shapiro’s story is the subject of a feature film, “My Name Is Sara.”
Mickey Shapiro said in a news release that he hopes the gift will give future generations access to the important resources and learning materials the foundation provides.
“The world needs to learn from the Holocaust, and that will always be true,” he said.
Library of Congress
David and Amy Fulton gave $20 million to help support the acquisition of a rare musical instrument, the 1690 Tuscan-Medici viola by Antonio Stradivari. The family of the late Cameron Baird, a co-founder of the Buffalo Pipe and Foundry Company, contributed an in-kind donation to make the acquisition for the viola possible. The viola was previously on loan to the Library by the Baird family’s Tuscan Corporation, in a collaborative custodial arrangement that goes back to 1977.
David Fulton is a statistician and a violinist. He founded the Department of Computer Science at Bowling Green State University in 1970, and co-founded Fox Software, which developed the database management application FoxPro, and sold the company to Microsoft in 1992. During his academic career, Fulton performed professionally with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra as a violinist.
Baird was a musician who helped establish the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and developed the University of Buffalo’s music department. He served as the department’s first chair until his death in 1960. Baird bought the Tuscan-Medici viola in 1957 from the estate of Herbert Straus, a musician and an heir to the Macy’s department store fortune, who had owned the instrument since 1924.
The Tuscan-Medici viola was commissioned from Stradivari in 1690 by Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand prince of Tuscany and patron of music in Florence, to form a Stradivari quintet with instruments previously given to him.
University of California at Los Angeles Health
UCLA alumni Heidi and Larry Canarelli gave $10 million through their Canarelli Family Foundation to support a stroke-rescue program and a neurosurgery program. Of the total, they’ve given $6 million to bolster the UCLA Arline and Henry Gluck Stroke Rescue Program’s effort to establish a third mobile stroke unit, and $4 million to establish the Canarelli Family Oligodendroglioma Brain Tumor Research Fund.
Larry Canarelli leads BRUIN Capital Partners, a real-estate investment firm in Las Vegas, and founded the Las Vegas homebuilder American West Homes, which he sold to PulteGroup in 2019. The couple’s foundation primarily supports education, health, housing sustainability and the arts.
Yale School of Medicine
Joseph Frederick Hoffman left $9 million to establish several endowed professorships — the Elena Citkowitz Professorship of Internal Medicine for a lipidology expert, the Joseph F. Hoffman Professorship of Physiological Sciences, and the Peter N. Herbert Professorship of Medicine — and several endowed funds, including the Joseph F. Hoffman Fellowship Fund to provide financial aid for graduate students in Yale’s Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, the Joseph F. Hoffman Ophthalmology Fund, and the Joseph F. Hoffman Endowed Fund for Medicine. His bequest will also support the Medical Historical Library.
Hoffman was a respected scientist who spent his career studying ion transport across red blood cell membranes, and discovered in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Tosteson the “pump leak model,” which explained how cells maintain ionic equilibrium. He joined the medical school in 1965 and served as the chair of the Department of Physiology from 1967 to 1968 and again from 1973 to 1979. He was later named the Higgins Professor Emeritus of Cellular and Molecular Physiology.
He started his academic career as a professor at Princeton University and conducted research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Cambridge, and the National Institutes of Health before joining Yale’s medical school. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. He died in 2022 at 97.
University of Missouri
Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield gave $4.6 million through their Sinquefield Charitable Foundation to bolster the expansion of the Mizzou New Music Initiative, which operates festivals, competitions, and other programs for composers, musicians, and grade school, middle school, high school students. The money will also support scholarships and other awards.
Rex Sinquefield co-founded Dimensional Fund Advisors, an investment firm in Austin, Tex., where Jeanne Sinquefield oversaw the trading department and was executive vice president until she retired in 2005.
The couple helped to establish New Music Initiative, and Jeanne Sinquefield currently serves on the university’s Board of Curators. The Sinquefields are longtime donors to higher education and appeared on the Chronicle’s 2018 Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors for a nearly $80 million gift they gave to Saint Louis University that year.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
