Shaare Zedek Medical Center Receives Biggest Gift Ever

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum has donated $200 million to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, the largest donation ever made to an Israeli medical institution.

The donation, made through the Koum Family Foundation, will fund the construction of a new 800-bed hospitalization tower at the hospital’s Jerusalem campus. The project is expected to be built over six years, with the full space filled within a decade.

The hospital will be renamed the Koum Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Shaare Zedek currently has about 1,000 beds, 30 inpatient departments, 70 outpatient clinics and units, and Jerusalem’s busiest emergency department. The new tower is expected to make it Israel’s largest hospital, eventually increasing the medical center’s capacity to around 3,000 beds.

Shaare Zedek president Prof. Jonathan Halevy said the donation reflected the Koum Family Foundation’s confidence in the hospital. Halevy, who served as the hospital’s director-general for more than three decades, said he had been in contact with the foundation for about 10 years and worked closely over the past year with foundation head Yana Kalika on the new project.

Halevy said the foundation first donated $15 million to Shaare Zedek about a decade ago, helping fund projects including a catheterization center. He said the foundation’s latest gift came after it saw that the hospital met deadlines and performed reliably.

Shaare Zedek director-general Prof. Ofer Merin called the donation one of the hospital’s most important milestones.

The new tower will be 24 stories tall and cover more than 140,000 square meters. It will include major underground areas and a rooftop helipad for direct helicopter access. The design is being handled by Haifa’s Mochly-Eldar architectural firm.

The project is expected to cost around $750 million in total. Halevy said the hospital already has $300 million, including the Koum donation, and expects additional support from the Finance Ministry through the Health Ministry and from other donors.

The tower will expand the emergency department, internal medicine, orthopedic and intensive care facilities, while reducing crowding in inpatient rooms. Four hundred beds are expected to be added within six years, with another 400 added in the following four years.

Koum, who was born in Kyiv and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, co-founded WhatsApp, which was sold to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion. He has since become a major donor to Jewish, educational and pro-Israel causes.