YSM Home Page | Medicine@Yale

January/February 2007   Volume 3 Issue 1

Following in his father’s footsteps

The Israel family—Wendy, Thomas, Barbara and (far right) Emily—has strong ties with the medical school and with Dean Robert J. Alpern (second from right).

Yale alumnus, investor makes unrestricted gift to School of Medicine

Carrying on a philanthropic tradition begun by his late father, Adrian C. “Ace” Israel of the Yale Class of 1936, investor and Yale alumnus Thomas C. Israel has made a gift of $5 million to the School of Medicine. Israel, who says his family has long had a deep interest in medical science, placed no restrictions on the new gift, saying that confidence in the medical school’s leadership overruled any need to earmark the funds.

“If we trust the people and the institution we give money to, we should feel that they’ll use good judgment as to how it’s used,” says Israel, a 1966 Yale graduate and chair of A.C. Israel Enterprises, a New York City-based firm that invests in private equity funds and makes direct private equity investments.

For Robert J. Alpern, M.D., the medical school’s dean and Ensign Professor of Medicine, the warm feelings are mutual. “One of my great pleasures as dean has been the opportunity to come to know the Israel family closely,” Alpern says. “Their enthusiastic support for Yale and the medical school continues a family legacy that has helped shape what we are and where we can go. I am especially appreciative that Tom and Barbara had the confidence in Yale and in me to place no restrictions on how this gift is used.”

All told, Israel and his wife, Barbara, have donated more than $7 million to the medical school, including a $1 million commitment toward establishing a professorship in memory of Donald J. Cohen, M.D., a renowned child psychiatrist and director of the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) who died in 2001.

These gifts complement a $1.25 million donation made by Adrian Israel in 1986 to establish the School of Medicine’s Magnetic Resonance Research Center.

Both Thomas and Adrian Israel have also been active and longstanding supporters of the Yale School of Management (SOM), where the Adrian C. Israel Professorship of International Trade and Finance was established in 1976.

After Adrian’s death, Thomas, who serves on the SOM’s advisory board, combined money from his father’s estate with his own 25th reunion gift to Yale to establish the International Finance Center at the SOM, which was formally dedicated in 1999.

The Israel name is best known on the Yale campus in association with the Adrian C. “Ace” Israel Fitness Center, a spectacular 20,000-square-foot facility at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium built with funds that Thomas Israel directed from the portion set aside in his father’s bequest to support Yale athletics.

Thomas and Barbara Israel’s interest in the medical school has been reinforced by the recent educational experiences of their two daughters at the YCSC. In 2001, the Israels’ oldest daughter Emily won a Harris Fellowship in Child Development and Early Childhood Education to work at the YCSC after college, and she later did research there to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y.

As a Yale undergraduate, their youngest daughter Wendy took courses taught by YCSC faculty and taught at the Calvin Hill day care center in New Haven. She now teaches at a school for children with learning disabilities in White Plains, N.Y. Both Thomas and Emily Israel now serve as YCSC Associates.

In addition to his father, his daughter Wendy and himself, Yale alumni in Thomas’s family include an uncle, a brother (now deceased) and a nephew.

Of his own undergraduate years as an American Studies major, Israel says that although he didn’t fully realize it at the time, the Yale of the mid-1960s provided an unusually rich setting for a young man with a keen interest in our country’s history and culture. John F. Kerry, future war hero, senator and presidential candidate, was Israel’s classmate and a fellow member of the Yale soccer team (a knee injury that sidelined Israel from the soccer and lacrosse teams dogs him to this day); George Pataki, who would become governor of New York and a leader of the Republican Party, entered Yale one year later; Israel’s junior year saw the arrival of freshman George W. Bush, who would go on to make history as the 43rd president of the United States.

Israel sees his family’s gifts as giving back to Yale for the most enduring rewards of his college days, “a wonderful education and a wonderful group of friends—friendships that are hard to duplicate.”