Alan B. Slifka, a New York investment manager who used his fortune to promote harmony among Israeli Arabs and Jews and to give the Big Apple Circus its start, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81 and also had a home in Manhattan.
Seven years after starting the company, Mr. Slifka visited friends in Israel and could not understand why so few of them were friendly with Arab-Israeli citizens. “He toured Arab villages,” Ms. Ritvo-Slifka said, “and was troubled at the discrepancies in how they lived.” With $500,000, Mr. Slifka started the Abraham Fund Initiatives, named for the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and Jews. Since its establishment, the fund has provided more than $10 million in grants for a range of educational programs to dispel stereotypes and to foster Jewish-Arab cooperation in health, social services and women’s rights. Among many projects, it has supported an Arab-Jewish theater workshop, touring chamber music quartets and a karate program for Jewish and Arab youngsters.
Mr. Slifka also donated more than $20 million to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and in 2003 gave $5 million to Brandeis University to create a master’s degree program in coexistence studies.
Harvard Business School profile in 2001.
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