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- Assets: $2,710,042 (2005)
- Grants Received: $4,610,014 (2005)
- Grants Awarded: $2,060,000 (2005)
The Righteous Persons Foundation (RPF) was established in 1994 by film director Steven Spielberg with profits he earned from Schindler's List. Upon donating $53 million to launch the new Foundation, the filmmaker remarked that he "could not keep the money profited from the movie because it was blood money."
RPF professes a commitment to supporting organizations that seek to strengthen Jewish life in the United States. Specifically, it "funds projects which create meaningful experiences for Jewish youth and young adults, encourage Jewish learning, promote tolerance and inter-group relations, and use the arts and media to engage broad audiences and explore what it has meant, and can mean today, to be a Jew." The Foundation also finances "Jewish historical projects that relate to the Holocaust." As of 2006, RPF had made grants totaling more than $62 million to various projects and organizations.
The Chairman of RPF is Steven Spielberg. The President is Gerald Breslauer, who also serves as Vice Chairman and Secretary of the Washington, DC-based organization Communities in Schools, Inc. The RPF Grants Administrator (who runs the Foundation's day-to-day activities, as well as those of the Barbra Streisand Foundation) is Margery Tabankin of Tabankin Associates. RPF pays Tabankin more than $400,000 in consulting fees each year. RPF's Associate Director is Rachel Levin, who previously worked on various political and social causes such as the Hollywood Women's Political Committee and "Reboot," an effort to build a network of young Jewish people Jews with backgrounds in entertainment, media, technology, literature, politics, social activism, and religion.
Among the recent recipients of Righteous Persons Foundation philanthropy are: the Tides Center; the Tides Foundation; People for the American Way; Human Rights Watch; the New Israel Fund; the Jewish Fund for Justice; the Progressive Jewish Alliance; and the Joshua Venture.
In 2003, RPF was one of 30 foundations (among them the Rockefeller Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation) that financed the production and distribution of the film Trembling Before God, a documentary by Sandi DuBowski that "portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma -- how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality." The film features the world's first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, numerous married Hasidic gays and lesbians, and other Jewish homosexuals.
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