The Institute cultivates the next generation of researchers who will advance Rabbi Sacks’s intellectual legacy in Israel and beyond. By recruiting outstanding doctoral and masters level students, the Institute ensures that Rabbi Sacks’s ideas, perspectives, and concerns are integrated into academic and intellectual discourse in Israel and extended across the global academy.
In practice, this mission takes shape through the production of rigorous academic publications and the creation of a scholarly network of Israeli academics and intellectuals that reflects the Institute’s broader objectives.
Doctoral fellowships are awarded on topics central to Rabbi Sacks’s concerns. Fellows publish academic work, disseminate their findings, and contribute to building an intellectual community that ensures Rabbi Sacks’s thought receives the recognition and engagement it deserves.
Cohort 2 Fellows, 2026-27:
Amit Aizenman (Prof. Nacshon Perez)
Postdoctoral: The Rabbinic Sermon as Moral Essay - Civic-Religious Education in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Miriam Rafai (Profs. Hanoch Ben Pazi, C. Cordoni)
Doctoral: Exit from Apocalypse? Ethical Messianism as a Jewish Response to Climate Change, Crisis, and Uncertainty
Matti Laufer (Dr. Miriam Feldmann Kaye)
Masters: Between Preservation and Innovation: Re-interpretation as a Condition for the Vitality of Tradition in Contemporary Jewish Thought
Yehoshua Felberg (Drs. Feldmann Kaye, B. Schvarcz)
Masters: One People, Many Voices: The Political and Jewish Philosophy of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Cohort 1 Fellows, 2025-26:
Akiva Tor (Dr. Zellman)
Doctoral: The Foreign Policy of a Jewish and Democratic State
Davina Wanderer-Kriel (Prof. Ben Pazi)
Doctoral: Revelation, Withdrawal and Disclosure: The Manifestation of God in Contemporary Jewish Theology
Yaarit Malka (Prof. Perez)
Masters: The Corruption of Religion by the State: A Case Study of the Haredi Community in Israel
Eitan Philips (Dr. Feldmann Kaye)
Masters: Competing Notions of Diversity: A Comparative Study of Rabbis Jonathan Sacks & Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi regarding the Tower of Babel