The Wilf Family: Vikings Owners, Real Estate, and Jewish Philanthropy
Zygi and Mark Wilf own the Minnesota Vikings and quietly direct one of the most consequential Jewish philanthropic operations in the diaspora — 60 years of business, 50 years of foundations, three generations of family engagement.
Zygi and Mark Wilf own the Minnesota Vikings, run one of America's largest private real estate firms, and quietly direct one of the most consequential Jewish philanthropic operations in the diaspora — funding Yeshiva University, Yad Vashem, Israeli institutional life, and the Jewish Federations of North America. A 60-year story that Jewish media has never fully mapped.
The Wilf Family Foundations are a network of seven affiliated private foundations based in Short Hills, New Jersey, giving to Jewish causes, education, health, social justice, and Israel. Founded in 1964 by brothers Harry Wilf and Joseph Wilf — Polish-born Holocaust survivors who arrived in the United States in 1950 — the foundations are administered as a single operation and directed by the second and third generations of the family.
In 2024, Garden Homes, the Wilf real estate business, celebrated its 60th year. In the same year, the Wilf Family Foundations celebrated their 50th. Combined family net worth is estimated at over $5 billion. The philanthropic footprint runs across three continents.
And virtually all of it has been built out of view of mainstream Jewish media, which continues to cover the family primarily as owners of the Minnesota Vikings NFL franchise.
The Origin
Harry and Joseph Wilf were born in Poland in 1921 and 1925. Both survived the Holocaust. Joseph's mother, Miriam Fisch — the family calls her Baba Miriam — was a hero of the family survival story: she obtained Christian papers, escaped the Lvov ghetto with her young children, and hid them on a farm in German-occupied Poland. Harry and his wife Judith survived by parallel routes.
The brothers emigrated to the United States in 1950 with their wives, Judith and Elizabeth, and settled in Hillside, New Jersey. They started Garden Homes in 1954, initially buying and renting apartment buildings, then building single-family homes. It was slow, disciplined real estate work.
Six decades later, Garden Homes and Garden Commercial Properties have constructed roughly 25,000 homes across 39 states and own and manage more than 25 million square feet of retail and business property. It is one of the largest privately held real estate operations in the country.
Fourteen years after founding the business, in 1964, the brothers established the Wilf Family Foundation. It was an unusual move for the era. Family foundations were rare in the American Jewish community at that time; the Wilfs were among the first survivor-founded families to institutionalize their giving as a permanent multi-generational vehicle. That decision — 1964, before the Six-Day War, before the modern American Jewish philanthropic apparatus — is the tell for how strategically the founders thought about legacy.
Harry Wilf died in 1992. Joseph Wilf died in 2016. The businesses and the foundations passed to Harry's son Leonard Wilf and Joseph's sons Zygi Wilf and Mark Wilf, and to their families.
The Vikings and Beyond
In 2005, Zygi and Mark Wilf, joined by cousin Leonard, purchased the Minnesota Vikings. Zygi became owner and chairman; Mark became president; Leonard, vice chairman. They are entering their 21st season with the team in 2025.
The Wilfs also own Orlando City SC and Orlando Pride in Major League Soccer and the National Women's Soccer League — Mark chairs both.
The football and soccer holdings are, in one sense, side ventures next to the real estate portfolio. But they matter for two reasons. First, they anchor the family's public profile in American sports media. Second, they have generated a second Minnesota-based philanthropic stream — the Vikings Foundation, launched in 2017, and initiatives like Vikings Table, a food truck delivering free meals to underserved children in the Twin Cities. Between 2018 and today, the Wilf family and the Vikings have committed more than $8 million to social justice causes across the U.S.
The sports capital → community foundation flow is one of the most under-analyzed structural pipelines in diaspora philanthropy.
The Jewish Portfolio
Jewish giving is the core of the Wilf philanthropic operation, and it runs across five main pillars.
Yeshiva University. The Wilf family has been YU's largest sustained donor family for decades. The main Manhattan campus of YU is named the Wilf Campus. Both Zygi and Mark serve as YU Trustees. The Wilf Family Distinguished Scholarship Fund has supported over 100 undergraduate scholarships in a single recent year alone. When YU faced its 2022 legal fight over recognizing the YU Pride Alliance, the Wilf Family Foundations issued a public statement disagreeing with the university's position — a rare public break with a beneficiary institution, and a signal of how independently the family principals think about YU governance.
Yad Vashem. Leonard Wilf served as chairman of the American Society of Yad Vashem. Joseph Wilf served as the first North American chair of the March of the Living, which dedicated its 2017 edition to his memory. Mark Wilf is a major donor to Yad Vashem and to the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel. Holocaust memory sits at the emotional and strategic center of the family's giving — a direct throughline from Baba Miriam's ghetto escape to seven affiliated foundations funding memorialization on three continents.
Jewish Federations of North America. Mark Wilf served as national campaign chairman and was elected chair of the JFNA board of trustees in 2018. He was subsequently appointed to lead a new JFNA initiative addressing the needs of impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the United States. The Wilfs have supported the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey for decades and helped build the Metrowest Campus of UJA-Federation in East Hanover — one of the largest suburban Jewish community campuses in the country.
Israeli housing and infrastructure. The Wilf Family Foundations have partnered with the Jewish Agency for Israel on the joint Government of Israel–Jewish Agency initiative to build 2,650 housing units on Jewish Agency lands across Israel. The first completed project came online with Wilf backing. The choice to fund physical Israeli infrastructure — rather than only educational or advocacy work — is distinctive.
Voice of the People. The initiative launched by the President of Israel to build an international network for shared Jewish future planning is co-funded by the Wilf Family Foundations alongside the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. The network now includes 150 Jewish leaders from around the world. President Herzog personally launched the initiative in 2023, and Wilf participation from the outset signals top-tier institutional access.
The Broader Portfolio
The Wilf giving extends well beyond Jewish institutional life.
New York University. Leonard Wilf is vice chairman of the NYU Board of Trustees and vice chairman of the NYU Law School board. The Wilf Family Foundations have been longtime NYU supporters.
New York Law School. A $5 million gift from Zygi Wilf established the Wilf Impact Scholars Program, training a next generation of social justice-oriented lawyers.
Minnesota health. In 2015, a $5 million gift from the Wilf Family Foundation established the Wilf Family Center at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital — an 11,000 square foot addition supporting pediatric research and training.
Pro Football Hall of Fame. A 2019 $1 million gift funded the Founders Exhibit tracking the history of NFL ownership and the role of women in the league.
COVID response. During the pandemic, the Wilf Family Foundations and the Vikings deployed over $5 million in combined donations to healthcare workers, seniors, food banks, and Jewish causes across Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, and Israel.
The breadth is deliberate. Family principals sit on boards of trustees at NYU, Yeshiva University, the American Society of Yad Vashem, the JFNA, and the NFL Foundation. That kind of governance-level engagement — Wilf principals actually running institutions, not just funding them — is the second-order feature of the model.
Comparing the Models
The Wilf model is one of four visible large-scale diaspora Jewish philanthropic approaches worth naming.
The Wilf model is multi-generational family continuity. Seven foundations under one administrative roof. Family principals in every seat. Institutional-board engagement as a feature. Sixty years of business, fifty years of foundations, three generations of family involvement.
The Marcus model — profiled in Bernie Marcus's $2 Billion Bet — is time-limited high-concentration deployment. Founder-directed. Big issue bets. Structured to spend down in twenty years.
The Tikvah model — profiled in Inside Tikvah: The Jewish Leadership Pipeline — is education-pipeline building. Seventh grade through college. Bernstein-estate seed capital. Ideologically coherent institutional stack.
The Herzl Institute model — profiled in Inside the Herzl Institute — is ideas-first influence. Small Jerusalem-based intellectual shop. Oversized global political impact.
The Wilf model is the most conservative of the four, in the classical sense — patient, multi-generational, institutionally embedded. For Jewish family philanthropies planning fifty-year giving trajectories, it is the closest thing to a template that currently exists.
Why It Matters
Three signals for anyone tracking Jewish philanthropy.
One: The multi-vehicle model works. Seven foundations operating under one administrative roof — with individual family branches running their own vehicles under a shared strategy — is a scalable succession model that a lot of Jewish family philanthropies could learn from. Zygi's Zygmunt and Audrey Wilf Foundation, Mark and Jane Wilf's foundation, and the Wilf Family Education Foundation each run independently but coordinate. It is what disciplined next-generation transition looks like.
Two: Sports capital is Jewish philanthropic capital. The Wilfs are one of the clearest examples of how American Jewish family wealth flows through professional sports ownership into Israel infrastructure, Holocaust memory, and Jewish education. That corridor — sports team → community foundation → Israel infrastructure — is one of the most under-analyzed structural pipelines in diaspora philanthropy.
Three: The family's real growth is in Israel infrastructure. The Voice of the People commitment and the Jewish Agency housing partnership signal a strategic shift: the Wilfs are increasingly directing capital toward Israeli institutional and physical infrastructure, not just American Jewish institutional life. That is a long-horizon bet on the material infrastructure of the Israeli state, tied directly to Holocaust-survivor family history.
For diaspora capital watchers, the Wilf model — 60 years of business, 50 years of institutional giving, three generations of family engagement, three continents of grantmaking — is one of the definitive templates for how Jewish family wealth is supposed to work over the long term.
FAQ
What are the Wilf Family Foundations? A network of seven affiliated private family foundations based in Short Hills, New Jersey, founded in 1964 by brothers Harry and Joseph Wilf, Holocaust survivors from Poland.
Who runs the foundations today? Second-generation family principals — Leonard Wilf (Harry's son), Zygi Wilf, and Mark Wilf (Joseph's sons) — together with third-generation family members.
What is Garden Homes? The Wilf family real estate business, founded in 1954. One of the largest privately held real estate development and management companies in the United States, with roughly 25,000 homes across 39 states and over 25 million square feet of commercial property.
What is the Wilf Campus? The main Manhattan campus of Yeshiva University, named for the Wilf family in recognition of decades of philanthropic support.
What connection do the Wilfs have to the Minnesota Vikings? Zygi Wilf is owner and chairman of the Minnesota Vikings; Mark Wilf is president; Leonard Wilf is vice chairman. The family purchased the team in 2005.
What are the Wilf family's Israel priorities? Yad Vashem, the March of the Living, Jewish Agency housing initiatives, Voice of the People (the President of Israel's shared Jewish future initiative), and broad Israeli institutional support.
How does the Wilf model compare to other Jewish megadonor vehicles? See Inside Tikvah: The Jewish Leadership Pipeline, Bernie Marcus's $2 Billion Bet, and Inside the Herzl Institute for parallel models of diaspora capital deployment.
