AFTER YEARS of nurturing the minds of African Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mark Gelfand (who has many friends in Swampscott) has turned his significant energy to eradi­cating hunger in African Jewish communities.

The Carnegie Mellon-educated engineer’s first foray into Africa, in 2010, was creating the Foka STEM Training Center in Bishoftu, Ethiopia. Since then, his nonprofit STEMpower has established 162 STEM schools in 49 countries, all of which save two – in Morocco and Moroccan (Western) Sahara – are in sub-Sahara Africa.

“Everything is kicking on all cylinders,” said Gelfand, who grew up in Cleveland and lived on the North Shore for decades. “We’ve actually had a few [schools] destroyed by war or confiscated by enemy troops, but some of those have been fixed and corrected. Other than that, almost every STEM center is operating really well, and in some cases phenomenally well. It’s more of a self-sustainable Midas-touch kind of thing rather than a gamble that falls apart.”

Gelfand sees a close connection between the STEM centers and the agricultural projects. “I consider it a win when I’m connected to a place multiple ways,” he said.

“The Jewish farm communities help each other with ideas and practices, they patriotically help their countries by coordinating university STEM centers, and two Jewish communities host the STEM center facilities for overburdened universities.”

GELFAND’S INTEREST in Africa developed about three decades ago. A friend was teaching Ethiopian olim in the Yemin Orde youth village in Israel, and while Gelfand appreciated the school’s art studio, he was disappointed they had no science or engineering facilities.

“How do they expect these kids to be productive members of society if they’re not becoming builders and makers and doers?” he said. “I’m not interested in creating good feelings, I’m interested in technical proficiency. So I put in a science center there.”

The Ethiopian students loved it and thanked him profusely. What they really wanted, though, was to compete against a neighboring high school in a robotics contest. “I said to them, ‘What are you, crazy? The Israelis’ mothers and fathers are scientists and engineers, every one of them. You guys have been shepherds for a thousand years,’” he said.

Inspired by the students’ enthusiasm, though, Gelfand added robotics to the chemistry and physics already being taught. Seven years later, the school started winning contests, ultimately becoming the top robot-builder in Israel. Gelfand realized how “kids anywhere, everywhere can be very smart and clever. They just need a chance.”

At that point, he decided he needed to visit the students’ homeland, where an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 Jews still live. He wondered, Could he do for these people what he did for the Ethiopians in Israel?

His first project was rebuilding a grade school in Bishoftu, south of Addis Ababa. Next door was the state-run Ethiopian Defense University’s College of Engineering. When the government learned what Gelfand was doing, it became very interested. Soon, it partnered with him to create a STEM center at the university.

“I’ve seen many humanitarian projects in Africa,” Gelfand said. “They do something nice for a village, and then they go home, and that’s the end of it. I said, ‘That’s not what I want to do. I want to move the country’s needle.’”

First, his goal was to build a STEM center in each of Ethiopia’s 12 regions; then it grew to each of the country’s four dozen universities. Shortly, neighboring South Sudan heard about the facilities, and Gelfand’s STEMpower project began growing across the continent.

His philanthropy in Africa doesn’t follow the typical grantmaking model in other ways. One of his personal guidelines is to create STEM centers that, once he’s provided the infrastructure, sustain themselves and cover all operating expenses, including salaries.

“One of our secret sauce ingredients is that we hire the locals that are already in the government system,” he said. “We provide the lab equipment and install it and teach at the beginning, but they’re expected to carry on from there. So that really cuts the cost.

“I don’t want to give money to set them up and then next year, they’re going to ask for money again. When there’s an ask, the return better not include dependency forever. I can’t do that. I really consider my philanthropy as an investment. The only question is, Where do the returns on that investment go? Many of them are run like businesses, but even if they’re not required to by the government, I want them to think like a business.”

This entrepreneurial approach informs Gelfand philanthropy. “Success for me is making a living, that people make a living, and then build from there,” he said.

THIS PRACTICAL APPROACH also informed Gelfand’s move into agriculture.

An Ethiopian friend of his, now living in Jerusalem, learned of an abandoned farm in southern Ethiopia. They took it over, giving Gelfand, ever intellectually curious, the opportunity to learn about a whole new area: farming. There’s a shortage of chicken eggs in Ethiopia, and after a couple of years, they had established a 120,000-hen layer facility and animal feed mill, SuperOva Agrotech.

After SuperOva, Gelfand established Beeco Agro Industry – now the largest strawberry exporter in Ethiopia – on another abandoned farm. Then, through the STEM centers, some of which are located near Jewish communities, Gelfand became connected with local farmers. Many of Africa’s 50,000 Jews are subsistence farmers working individual plots of land. With his recently acquired knowledge of drip irrigation and growing crops and chickens, Gelfand became interested in working with them.

One of the first, launched in 2021, was the Abayudaya Men’s Club Pilot Broiler Farm in Uganda. That facility now produces 40,000 chickens a year. Gelfand has to date seeded 25 agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa, 22 of which are in Jewish communities. They produce everything from chickens, livestock and eggs to grains, vegetables and animal feed.

Significantly, many of these African Jews are farming collectively as a community, rather than in isolation. By pooling their resources and efforts, they are no longer merely subsisting but producing surplus food and cash crops; in turn, they can sell their goods in local markets for a profit, raising both their own and their non-Jewish neighbors’ standard of living.

While Gelfand admits to having invested “a fair amount” in his African projects over the years, he believes he’s put out far less than others who’ve done comparable work. His SuperOva poultry facility, for example, cost “less than a seventh” of the millions that an African government spent to build a similar facility.

“Maybe because the management is so actively involved, but whatever it is, I build tremendously cheaper and less expensively than others,” he said.

All but two of the farms are locally owned and operated. They are all, after Gelfand’s initial investment, self-sustaining, except for when they want to expand. He shared the example of the Lemba Jewish community in Limpopo, South Africa, that he seeded with $25,000 to grow Swiss chard.

“They had no electricity, they had only water that was underground, not enough, and we turned that into a growing field that ended up filling the supermarket shelves,” he said. That success led to another $25,000 grant for more land and irrigation equipment. “Now they’re the main Swiss chard grower in all of Limpopo. Well, now there’s another need: Because they have so much to produce, they can’t borrow trucks anymore, they need to have new trucks. So I put out another grant.”

This project in Limpopo is so successful that Gelfand has instituted a program where any Jewish community farm that wants to expand after its initial grant will get a walk-behind rototiller. “Now you have effectively a tractor at very little cost, and boom, they’re growing hectares and hectares,” he said. “It’s drip-irrigated, they’re protected against lack of rain, and they have a business. All of a sudden, nobody’s hungry, everybody’s eating.

“There’s a lot of cases like that, and I’m really happy.”

Gelfand still owns SuperOva and Beeco; but he’s “never taken a penny out” of them, he said. “I just reinvest down bigger.”

GELFAND ISN’T ALONE in these agricultural projects. He partners with two nonprofits also working to help Jewish communities thrive in far-flung corners of the Diaspora. Kulanu performs Jewish outreach and education and develops religious infrastructure in Africa, India and South America. The Sub-Saharan African Jewish Alliance (SAJA) coordinates efforts among the 50,000 Jews residing in 13 countries, including Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa.

Gelfand speaks almost daily with SAJA President Modreck Maeresera, who also leads the Harare Lemba Synagogue community in Zimbabwe and sits on the Kulanu board.

Writing in African Jewish Voices in 2024, Maeresera praised Gelfand’s efforts to combat African Jewish hunger.

“He holds the belief that merely establishing Jewish communities is insufficient; these communities require empowerment to achieve economic self-sufficiency,” Maeresera noted. “Most African countries are in a state of perennial food shortages, and under these circumstances, it is important that the Jewish communities we work with have food sovereignty. In Mark’s words, food security must come first, ahead of religious development.”

Maeresera wrote that in collaboration with Gelfand, African Jewish communities have established irrigation projects in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda and Zimbabwe; fisheries in Ivory Coast and Tanzania; and numerous egg and poultry farms.

Agricultural projects to address food insecurity can have wider benefits, Maeresera notes: Irrigation infrastructure and access to clean borehole water in Zimbabwe, for example, has helped alleviate that country’s cholera outbreak; and with southern Africa experiencing its worst drought in living memory, having functional irrigation projects creates fail-safe facilities for food production.

Maeresera praises how Gelfand’s efforts to promote economic sustainability dovetail with Kulanu’s efforts to encourage religious practices like placing mezuzahs on African Jewish doors.

“Through these projects,” Maeresera writes, “Kulanu and the Gelfand food security grants complement each other. Kulanu’s mezuzahs will find well-established, economically self-reliant Jewish communities, and the mezuzahs have a greater chance of remaining stuck on the doors.”

“THIS WHOLE JOURNEY has been beyond my wildest imagination of the different things I would learn, know, become an expert in, want to be involved in,” Gelfand said. “My father wanted me to be a doctor, my grandmother wanted me to be a doctor. I said, ‘I don’t want to do that, but I still want to help people.’”

Being an engineer, he decided, was the best way he could follow the guidelines laid out by his family, which were to contribute to society and the Jewish people.

“That’s what I’m living through,” he said. “It’s respect for my parents, community, my family, historical family, the people I never even knew. It’s also kind of a place in society somehow. That’s what I’ve been striving for and seeking.

“You see it crystallized in things like the STEM centers or the community farms in Jewish communities.” Θ