For 200 years, the Victorian Bath House in Bishopsgate has been a place to unwind in the heart of the City of London.
But these days, rather than the hot steam of a Turkish baths, visitors come to recline with a drink in the quaintly housed bar.
On a hot summer evening, the venue played host to a jazz concert for the Tel Aviv University Trust. The musicians were joined on stage by 17-year-old New Yorker Robert Ukrainsky, a talented saxophonist, whose mother, Rada Sumareva-Ukrainsky, a governor of the university, had sponsored the event.
Sipping their gin cocktails, guests were told about one of the university’s newer initiatives, a partnership between its dentistry school and the Akim charity to train adults with learning disabilities to work in dental clinics.
The jazz evening was one of the 20 or so events staged by the trust each year. And well might supporters raise a glass or two as 2018 was a record year, with an income of £11.8 million, establishing it as one of the leading charities in the UK Jewish community.
In 2015, the trust raised just over £1.1 million. But by the following year, its income had leapt to £8.5 million. The reason was that for the first time, its accounts that year included donations sent directly to the university in Israel by British contributors rather than simply those transmitted through the London office. The change gave a truer picture of the level of local support.
Direct donations accounted for £8.6 million of the 2018 total.
Chief executive Cara Case attributes the rise to growing recognition that “education is the future. Israel does not have a lot of natural resources but it does have a lot of brainpower,” she pointed out.
“People are looking at the success stories in cybersecurity or nanoscience. Israel is at the forefront of research and Tel Aviv is at the cutting edge.”
Breakthroughs such as the 3D printed heart, announced by Tel Aviv University scientists in spring this year, have caught the public imagination. In a decade or so, transplants may be a thing of the past and diseased organs replaced by manufactured substitutes.
In 2013, the university launched a 10-year campaign to raise $1 billion dollars (£640 million then, £740 million at today’s rate) to mark its diamond jubilee in 2016. It has now reached 60 per cent of its target.
The campaign gave the trust — the third biggest support group outside USA and Israel — an incentive to stretch its wings.
The university has long enjoyed a base of British support from families such as the Porters and the Shermans. But they have been joined by major donors such as Jeremy Coller, chairman of investment firm Coller Capital, and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, until recently resident in London, who is sponsoring a new nanotechnology building on the Tel Aviv campus.
In 2013, Mr Coller pledged $50 million (around £40 million at today's rates) to what is now the Coller School of Management.
He wants Tel Aviv — whose business school is ranked the world’s top 30 — “to be the number one school for venture capital within the next ten years”, Ms Case said.
Such donors “don’t simply write cheques and walk away. They are a very visible presence and are active with the faculty. They stay in the loop.”
Whereas philanthropic support of institutions such as the university was once seen as simply a diaspora duty, it now represents a partnership. “Successful Israelis are giving significant money. That’s a big thing. It shows that if institutions are doing good enough work, Israelis will support them. Our donors do like to hear that.”
The new buildings being constructed as part of the $1 billion dollar campaign also play a role in countering Israel’s potential brain drain. “They are attracting back a lot of post-grads who may have studied at Harvard or Stanford. They are coming back to the same facilities they might have had at other universities,” Ms Case said.
Although the trust has helped to secure multi-million pound pledges for capital projects, they are not its sole focus. It is also encouraging the endowment of scholarships.
One donor has provided a six-figure sum to aid students from Israel’s non-Jewish communities who want to specialise in stringed instruments at Tel Aviv’s music school. “Smaller donations add up and are equally important,” Ms Case said.
And beyond the fundraising, the trust also helps to spread the word about Israel’s intellectual talent, introducing their work to some of their academic peers here.
