The Yael Foundation is an international philanthropic organization that supports Jewish education and strengthens Jewish identity across communities in 45 countries worldwide. Its educational approach is built on the understanding that meaningful experiences play a central role in learning, personal development, and long-term engagement. Research in cognitive science has consistently shown that emotionally meaningful experiences are more likely to become long-term memories, making experiential learning an important part of effective education.
This premise is supported by decades of cognitive neuroscience research, including the work of Professor James McGaugh, which demonstrates that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be retained in long-term memory through the interaction of the amygdala and hippocampus. Later studies from Boston College reached similar conclusions, showing that emotionally meaningful experiences are encoded and recalled more effectively than ordinary ones. For the Yael Foundation, these findings reinforce the importance of creating educational environments where learning is engaging, memorable, and connected to Jewish identity.
How the Yael Foundation builds deliberate systems
Most people can name a teacher whose impact has stayed with them, one who created moments that meant something beyond the lesson. Many Jewish schools in the Yael Foundation network already have such teachers. The Yael Foundation’s goal is to make that engagement consistent, not dependent on one person, ensuring impact is built into the structure rather than left to chance.
This kind of design is not unique to education. Brands invest heavily to create experiences people don’t forget, because those moments shape memory and build loyalty. The Yael Foundation applies the same logic to Jewish learning: if Judaism is an identity that education helps form, it should be built around meaningful experience from the start. In schools supported by the Yael Foundation, a lesson about a Jewish holiday can move beyond explanation to active participation through music, food, and storytelling. What students feel during that holiday, the role they play, and the memory that stays become the design questions the Yael Foundation encourages schools to ask first.
Different schools take different approaches. A Sunday school, a day school, and a camp each operate with their own strengths and constraints, and the Yael Foundation works across all of them through its network of 144 institutions in 45 countries and 101 cities, reaching 29,362 children. The shared task is to build repeatable structures that produce meaningful experience: multisensory rituals, opportunities for participation, and moments that can live beyond the classroom and continue at home.
Why memorable experience matters for Jewish education
Jewish identity today is formed in real time. Younger generations encounter moments that press them to define who they are, in social media, on campuses, and in public spaces, and those experiences are encoded and carried forward, shaping identity over time. While education cannot control the external environment, it can shape the internal experience, which makes the work of building positive, meaningful Jewish memory more urgent. A great deal of modern Jewish identity has been formed by the memory of hardship; those memories carry responsibility and weight. The Yael Foundation’s position is that Jewish education must also build positive emotional memory grounded in joy, pride, belonging, and connection. Children should not only know what the Jewish people have lived through; they should feel what Jewish life gives them. Designing for that feeling is the task the Yael Foundation sets for the schools it supports.
Education That Lasts Beyond School
The long-term impact of Jewish education, in the Yael Foundation’s view, is reflected in the knowledge, values, and sense of identity that remain with students throughout their lives. Meaningful educational experiences help build lasting memories that continue to influence how people understand their heritage, participate in community life, and engage with Jewish culture in ways that are personal and meaningful to them.
Young people today are surrounded by countless experiences competing for their attention, making memorable learning more important than ever. The Yael Foundation’s goal is to create learning experiences that remain relevant well beyond the classroom, helping students develop a lasting connection with Jewish education, culture, and identity.