Mandel Foundation's $125 million gift is the largest to higher education in Ohio

On 1 May 2026 Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland announced a $125 million commitment from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation and its supporting foundation. It is the largest gift in the foundations' 73-year history and, according to the university, the largest ever made to higher education in Ohio. It arrived in the year the university marks its bicentennial.

The money is split among four priorities. The largest is a new 50,000-square-foot Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Building, which will bring together humanities departments now scattered across campus and serve as a hub for digital scholarship, creative work and community partnerships. The gift also more than doubles scholarship endowment at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, which trains social workers; creates the Morton L. Mandel Presidential Chair, first held by president Eric W. Kaler; and expands the Experimental Humanities Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Mandel brothers, sons of a Jewish immigrant family in Cleveland, built the industrial distributor Premier Industrial Corporation and created their first foundation in 1953. Their philanthropy has focused on leadership, nonprofit management, the humanities, Jewish life and urban renewal, with major programmes in Cleveland, across the United States and in Israel. Morton Mandel, the last of the brothers, died in 2019; the foundation is now led by president and chief executive Jehuda Reinharz, the historian and former president of Brandeis University. Before this gift, the family and foundation had already given Case Western about $70 million, including naming its school of social work.

Foundation board chair Stephen Hoffman, a university trustee, said the gift reflects the foundation's belief in the growing importance of higher education, and of the humanities in particular. Morton Mandel himself completed his degree at Case Western 74 years after he first enrolled.