$50 million of generosity later, Philip and Cheryl Milstein name new mental health center
Philip and Cheryl Milstein’s latest commitment to Soroka Medical Center continues a multigenerational pattern of support that has shaped institutions across medicine, higher education, the performing arts, and Jewish communal life for more than half a century.
Their latest transformative lead gift, directed through the UJA-Federation of New York, will underwrite the establishment of Soroka’s new state-of-the-art Mental Health Center, which will bear their name.
The facility is designed to bring inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care, PTSD and trauma treatment, crisis intervention, family counseling, eating-disorder services, and specialized programs for children, adolescents, and adults under one roof, incorporating therapeutic gardens and restorative outdoor spaces.
It arrives at a moment of acute need in the Negev, where demand for mental-health and trauma services has risen sharply since October 7, 2023, and where Soroka remains the sole tertiary hospital serving more than one million residents across a region that comprises sixty percent of Israel’s land area.
The gift extends a relationship with Soroka that the Milstein family has sustained for years. Earlier support established the Vivian and Seymour Milstein Family Trauma Recovery Center for Children and Adolescents and has underwritten Staff Resilience programs that address the psychological toll borne by the hospital’s own workforce.
Prof. Shlomi Codish, director general of Soroka, has noted that communities across the Negev have endured rocket fire for a quarter-century, followed by the traumas of displacement, loss, and, in June 2025, a direct Iranian ballistic-missile strike on the hospital itself.
The new center is intended to provide the specialized, long-term care those experiences require.
Philip L. Milstein, born in 1949, is the eldest son of the late real estate developer Seymour Milstein and Vivian Leiner Milstein.
A 1971 Columbia College graduate and MBA from New York University, he built his career in the family real estate enterprise, later becoming a principal of Ogden Cap Properties and earlier serving as president of Emigrant Savings Bank.
Cheryl Glicker Milstein, a 1982 Barnard graduate and attorney trained at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, has served as chair of Barnard’s board of trustees.
Their philanthropy, often channeled through the PLM Foundation they established in the mid-1990s, has been concentrated on institutions with which the family has maintained multi-decade personal and fiduciary ties.
At Columbia, those ties reach back to the 1950s. Seymour Milstein chaired the board of New York-Presbyterian Hospital from 1989 to 1996; together with his siblings, he provided the lead gift for the Milstein Hospital Building, the main inpatient facility of New York-Presbyterian/Columbia.
In 2005, the Vivian and Seymour Milstein family made the transformational commitment that created the 142,000-square-foot Vivian and Seymour Milstein Family Heart Center.
Philip himself became a trustee of New York-Presbyterian in 2012 and has long served on Columbia’s board, rising to vice chair of the university trustees.
In 2013 he and Cheryl committed $20 million through their family foundation toward the Medical and Graduate Education Building at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, a facility intended to support collaborative training for physicians and biomedical scientists.
Their name is also attached to the Philip L. Milstein Family Library in Butler Library, to scholarship funds including the Milstein Scholars, and to multiple coaching endowments within the athletics program.
They helped drive the redevelopment of the Baker Athletics Complex, including the Campbell Sports Center and its Milstein Hospitality Pavilion, and in 2024 Columbia dedicated the Philip & Cheryl Milstein Family Tennis Center in their honor.
Philip received the Alexander Hamilton Medal in 2001 in recognition of his service to the university.
At Barnard the couple’s engagement has been equally sustained. Cheryl has chaired or co-chaired numerous annual galas and development efforts; the college’s Glicker-Milstein Theatre is named for her.
In 2016 their $25 million commitment formed one of the three largest gifts in Barnard’s history and helped fund the Cheryl and Philip Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, a 128,000-square-foot facility that also advanced the college’s technology requirements for undergraduates.
Three of their four children are Columbia or Barnard graduates, and the couple has established separate foundations for each of them, explicitly framing the next generation’s philanthropy as a continuation of the family’s pattern of institutional support.
Beyond the two campuses, the Milsteins have directed resources to cultural and Jewish communal institutions.
Philip has served as vice chair of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and earlier as president and chairman of the 92nd Street Y; in 2006 the couple gave $2 million to Lincoln Center’s capital campaign and have remained among its significant annual donors.
They have supported the New York Philharmonic, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, and the JED Foundation.
Together with the broader Vivian and Seymour Milstein family, they are recognized as Life Benefactors of UJA-Federation of New York, a designation reserved for lifetime giving of $10 million or more.
The current Soroka commitment, routed through that same federation, therefore sits within an established channel of support for Israel-related causes.
The amount of the new Mental Health Center gift has not been disclosed publicly.
What is clear is that it is a naming-level lead commitment at a moment when Soroka is recovering from physical damage and expanding capacity to treat the invisible wounds of prolonged conflict.
In that respect, the gift is consistent with the Milsteins’ earlier pattern: substantial, named investments in the physical and programmatic infrastructure of institutions that train physicians, educate students, stage the performing arts, and, now, provide specialized mental health care in a region that has absorbed repeated shocks.
Michael Kay, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, has described the gift as strengthening Israel’s medical system and long-term resilience; Rachel Heisler Sheinfeld, executive director of American Friends of Soroka Medical Center, has framed it as recognition that recovery requires attention to body, mind, and spirit.
For a family whose philanthropy has repeatedly underwritten the buildings and endowments that allow institutions to function at a higher level, the naming of