As Israel faces a doctor shortage, Jonathan Gray, the president of the investment firm Blackstone, and his wife, Mindy, are donating $125 million to Tel Aviv University’s health science and medical school.
The donation, through the Grays’ foundation, is the largest ever to Tel Aviv University, and is expected to allow the medical school enrollment to increase by a quarter. The funds will support, among other things, a new 600-bed dormitory, scholarships and new teaching facilities.
Israel’s limited capacity for medical training has contributed to a persistent shortage of doctors. As of 2020, the number of doctors per capita was about 10 percent below the average of countries in the Organization for Economic Corporation and Development.
“When Israeli students go to study medicine abroad, some of them stay — and for us, it’s a loss” Professor Ariel Porat, the university’s president, said. “This is the brain drain that people talk about in many other fields, but it’s especially acute with doctors.”
And Israel’s doctors are getting older, exacerbating the problem. Nearly half of the country’s doctors are older than 50, and about 25 percent are at least 67 years old.
In response to the shortage, Israeli officials have announced a number of initiatives to recruit more doctors, including interest-free loans for Israeli medical students studying abroad if they agree to return to Israel after graduation.
Mr. Porat said the Grays’ donation is likely to have an impact on the broader Israeli health care system. Tel Aviv University is Israel’s largest university, and includes schools of medicine, dentistry, public health as well as 18 affiliated hospitals.
Besides bolstering the overall number of students, the donation is also expected help the university double the number of Arab Israeli students in medical school, in part by offering scholarships and discounted housing in the school’s new dormitories, Mr. Porat said. About a quarter of Israel’s doctors are Arab Israeli.
The university’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences will be renamed the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. It was previously known as the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, after the billionaire Sackler family, owners of the opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The family, who have been sued for spurring the opioid epidemic, agreed to remove their name in 2023. The university said at the time it would enable the school to raise more money by offering naming opportunities.
Mr. Gray and his wife, both American Jews, are active philanthropists. Their foundation focuses on supporting low-income youth from New York and cancer research. Both say they feel a longstanding connection to Israel. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel “awakened a need to express that connection in a far more concrete way,” Mr. Gray said in a statement.
Shortly following the attack, the Gray Foundation gave $1 million to a program that pays for eighth graders in public and charter schools in New York to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.
As Mr. Gray and his wife looked for a larger-scale donation, they first met with Mr. Porat in New York last year. The Grays later traveled to Israel and met with university leadership, the medical faculty and students.
“We can think of no better way to accelerate healing,” they said in a statement, “than by supporting an institution that touches the lives of so many.”
