Amay Tewari

The Yale Endowment Justice Collective alleged on Instagram Thursday morning that Yale donated $1 million to an organization backing the Israeli military through a donor-advised fund.

Tina Posterli, a Yale spokesperson, confirmed the “distribution” to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was made in November 2023, one month after Israel became a subject of campus controversy following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent launch of Israel’s war in Gaza.

In its Instagram post, which has received more than 3,400 likes, the Endowment Justice Collective criticized Yale’s apparent role in financially supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Yale’s distribution of funds to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was made through a donor-advised fund, which allows donors to make initial tax-deductible contributions directly to Yale that are then invested and managed by the Yale Investments Office. The donor may recommend that their funds be distributed among specific areas of Yale or other charitable organizations.

“Part of the funds remain at Yale and part of the funds may go to one or more other charitable organizations,” Posterli said about the donor-advised funds.

Karen Peart, another Yale spokesperson, wrote to the News that a donor-advised fund is one of many donation options for a small subset of donors. Yale reviews the donors’ recommendations for where their donations go and “approves distribution of funds to qualified charitable organizations.”

The charities are approved if they are U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organizations, a type of nonprofit organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as exempt from federal income tax, Posterli said.

At least half of the funds donated through donor-advised funds and any appreciation or income attributed to those amounts must be designated for use at Yale, according to documents posted on University webpages. Furthermore, a webpage on Yale’s For Humanity campaign website says that the minimum initial gift for a donor-advised fund is $5 million dollars. 

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a New York City-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, collects charitable donations on behalf of the soldiers of Israel’s military, according to its website.

The Thursday Instagram post from the Endowment Justice Collective, which advocates for Yale to divest “from fossil fuels, distressed debt, military weapons, and other extractive and exploitative industries,” pointed to Yale’s tax filings from the fiscal year ending in June 2024, using its 990 Form Schedule I, which is publicly available online.

On the tax form, Yale is listed as making the donation to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. The source of the donor-advised fund was not named, and the News was unable to identify the original donor.

Yale’s 990 Form shows that it made three other donor-advised fund disbursements in the 2024 fiscal year — $10,000 to the Alliance for Middle East Peace, $500,000 to the Wonderland Educational Estate Association and $1,294,284 to Yale New Haven Hospital.

According to Mitchell Kane, a professor of taxation at New York University School of Law,  donor-advised fund sponsors like Yale “almost never” decline to follow a donor’s recommended disbursement.

“This will inevitably result in the university making transfers out of the endowment to 501c3 organizations that act in politically charged ways—this at a time when the historic need for universities as institutions to remain agnostic on political stances is greater than ever,” Kane wrote to the News.

However, Yale does have veto power over donors’ preferences for how their donor-advised funds are distributed, former Vice President for Development Charles Pagnam wrote to the News in 2001. Pagnam added that “it is unlikely the University and the donor will disagree about how the money will be used.”

Previously, a landing page on Yale’s Office of Planned Giving’s website included a document with information about making donations through donor-advised funds, according to Diego Loustaunau ’27, an organizer with the Endowment Justice Collective, who shared the old document with the News.

Loustaunau said the landing page was taken down on Thursday and reuploaded on Saturday without the donor-advised fund informational document. The News could not confirm when the website was edited.

According to Peart, the Office of Development, which is responsible for University fundraising,  uses a third party to manage the Planned Giving microsite, and it takes several days for updates to take effect. 

“We have recently changed vendors, and the entire site is under review as we prepare for the conclusion of the campaign and relaunch of Development sites in June 2026,” Peart wrote. 

A new document explaining donor-advised funds, which Peart shared, is “in queue” to be loaded onto the Planned Giving site, the spokesperson wrote.

Several changes were made to the updated document. The updated version was revised to explain that Yale donor-advised funds offer the tax advantages of giving to a “public charity” — which is Yale — rather than to a “non-profit organization.”  The last line of the old document, which says donors can make charitable distributions from a donor-advised fund anonymously, is removed from the updated document.

According to Loustaunau, the Endowment Justice Collective regularly studies Yale’s financial documents as part of its mission to hold the University accountable to its students and its stated values.

In its Instagram post about Yale’s distribution of funds to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, the Endowment Justice Collective also asked viewers to donate to a mutual aid fund for Palestinian families in Gaza. 

The Endowment Justice Collective was previously known as the Endowment Justice Coalition. 

Correction, Sept. 23: An earlier version of this article misnamed the office that manages Yale’s investments. It is the Yale Investments Office, not the Yale Investment Office.