$250 million gift from philanthropist John Paulson puts his and Alina’s names on university’s historic campus
On Saturday night, October 17th, at the Hebrew University’s Board of Governors Gala in Jerusalem, John Paulson stood up and announced the largest gift in the university’s 101-year history: $250 million.
To honor it, the university will rename the place where it began.
Mount Scopus, where the cornerstone was laid in 1918 and the doors opened in 1925, will now be called The Alina and John Paulson Campus, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem.
It is hard to name a more symbolic piece of ground in Israeli academic life. The university’s founders laid that cornerstone a full generation before the State of Israel existed.
They were some of the great Jewish minds of their time, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
Their bet was that a people with a long history of destruction could build a future on knowledge.
A century later, a Wall Street investor from Queens has put his name and the name of the woman he loves beside that idea.
The new gift brings Paulson’s total support for Hebrew University to $296 million.
He had already given $27 million in 2023 and another $19 million earlier this year.
That money went to a science and technology complex on the Edmond J. Safra Campus at Givat Ram, home to the Paulson Bar-El Building for Computer Science & Engineering and the John Paulson Building for Electrical Engineering.
The university gave him an honorary doctorate in 2024. Saturday’s announcement turned a steady relationship into the defining partnership of the university’s second century.
It is also the third-largest individual gift ever made to an Israeli university.
Paulson explained his reasons the way he might pitch a great investment, with conviction and with numbers.
“Israel, a country of only 10 million people, has astounded the world with its scientific and technological prowess,” he said.
He listed the university’s record: more than 10,750 patents, ten Nobel Prizes, two Turing Awards, and a Fields Medal.
He also pointed out that it educates students for far less than a comparable American university.
“Given its quality and productivity,” he said, “I can think of no more deserving university for philanthropic support than Hebrew University.”
Then he spoke from the heart. “This gift is also meant to show support and international solidarity with Israel,” he said.
“If there was ever a time to step up and support the country and its institutions, this would be it.
As a vibrant, democratic, pluralistic, and advanced economy, we should all be proud of what Israel has accomplished.”
The gift has four purposes. The largest share will build a new Faculty of Engineering. It is designed to bring engineering and computer science into close daily work with medicine and the life sciences, so the people who write code and the people who treat patients solve problems together.
A second major share will expand the university’s medical and biomedical work, including a new model of medical education the university has been developing and now hopes to grow nationally and internationally.
A third share will fund research on trauma and recovery after trauma, which has become deeply urgent for Israel in the years since October 7.
The fourth will create a new think tank that connects the university’s experts with pressing public needs in Israel and beyond.
Taken together, the plan carries the same instinct that has guided Paulson’s giving for more than a decade: building the places where talented young people learn to solve hard problems.
In 2015 he gave $400 million to Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, at the time the largest gift in Harvard’s history, and the school now bears his name.
In 2012 he gave $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy, then the largest gift ever to New York City’s park system.
He has given $100 million to NYU for the John A. Paulson Center on Washington Square and $20 million to NYU Stern, where an auditorium carries his name.
He also funded a children’s hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador, his father’s homeland.
That last gift says a lot about where he comes from.
Paulson was born in Queens, the third of four children.
His father, Alfredo, was born in Ecuador, was orphaned at 15, moved to Los Angeles at 16, and was wounded in Italy while serving in the U.S. Army in World War II.
His mother, Jacqueline, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Romania. The two met as students at UCLA.
Their son graduated as valedictorian, summa cum laude, from NYU’s business school, then earned his MBA at Harvard as a George F. Baker Scholar, in the top 5 percent of his class.
In 1994 he started Paulson & Co. with $2 million and one employee in office space rented from Bear Stearns on Park Avenue.
It became one of the most famous investment firms of its era.
Alina de Almeida, his fiancée and now his partner in this gift, brings her own commitment to health.
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, she is a clinical registered dietitian who trained at NewYork-Presbyterian, the hospital affiliated with Columbia and Cornell.
She later founded her own wellness practice, Effective Lifestyle.
Her name will now stand at the entrance to a campus whose future rests heavily on medicine and healing.
The couple’s daughter, Jacqueline, was born in February 2025 and shares the name of Paulson’s late mother.
A second child is on the way.
University President Tamir Sheafer framed the moment in the language of the university’s founding.
“Over a century ago on Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University was founded on a powerful idea: that where history had known destruction, the Jewish people would build a future through knowledge, discovery, and education,” he said.
“John Paulson’s extraordinary gift carries that vision forward into our second century.”
He called it “a profound expression of belief in Israel’s human capital.”
He said it will let the university recruit world-class faculty, support exceptional students, equip cutting-edge laboratories, and “transform bold ideas into life-changing breakthroughs.”
He also called Paulson’s leadership “an inspiring beacon to friends and leaders across the global Jewish community.”
That beacon has company. In the same week, Steven H. Lavin pledged $30 million to Hebrew University to greatly expand the number of medical students it can train.
The university, ranked 89th in the world in this year’s Shanghai Ranking, recently finished a seven-year centennial campaign that raised $1 billion.
Across Israel, major donors are making eight- and nine-figure commitments to universities and hospitals at a remarkable pace.
Paulson’s gift now sits near the top of that list.
Up on Mount Scopus, students cross the same hilltop where Einstein’s generation imagined a university before there was a country to hold it.
From now on they will do so on a campus that carries two new names.
Those names belong to a son of immigrants from Queens and a clinician from New Jersey, who looked at a 101-year-old institution during a difficult season and decided its best days were still ahead.