Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg pledges $2.5 million to ADL

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, has pledged $2.5 million to the Anti-Defamation League to support anti-hate programs in Europe and the United States.

Sandberg announces the gift in a post on Facebook — where else? — though she did not specify the amount. An ADL statement released minutes later says it would be $2.5 million.

In her post, Sandberg says she was making the contribution in honor of her parents’ 75th birthday and had been inspired to support the ADL following the shooting last week outside a synagogue in Germany.

“A week ago, on Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the Jewish year – I was sitting in synagogue, thinking about how, earlier that day, a gunman showed up at a synagogue in Germany, hoping to kill as many Jews as he could,” Sandberg writes. “He knew the temple would be full because of the holiday. In the end, a locked door kept him out, but he still managed to kill two people outside. Sitting in temple that day, I knew what my parents’ birthday present should be.”

The ADL’s national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, says the gift comes at a “critical juncture in the fight against bigotry.”

Sandberg’s post also mentioned her parents’ “horror” at rising anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, including at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. She also notes a recent family trip to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, as a “powerful reminder of where this hate can lead.”

— JTA