New JHF President and CEO Danny Rosen seeks to continue foundation’s legacy
'The foundation’s mission is not going to change...We have a commitment to improving health, strengthening communities, supporting vulnerable populations and seeking out where there are opportunities for us to have an impact'
Since arriving in Pittsburgh more than two decades ago, Danny Rosen has dedicated his days to improving outcomes for vulnerable populations. Both as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work and as a volunteer with organizations, including Friendship Circle of Pittsburgh, AgeWell Pittsburgh and the Allegheny Regional Asset District, Rosen, a former resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has offered time and expertise while striving to create a better Pittsburgh.
Weeks into his new role as president and CEO of Jewish Healthcare Foundation, Rosen told the Chronicle he aims to continue those efforts and work in partnership with the foundation’s staff and board to support critical endeavors.
“The foundation’s mission is not going to change,” he said. “We have a commitment to improving health, strengthening communities, supporting vulnerable populations and seeking out where there are opportunities for us to have an impact.”
Even with a familiar mission, new challenges exist.
Attacks on healthcare, science and research funding have made the foundation’s work “more important than ever,” he said.
The National Institutes of Health issued 24% fewer grants in 2025 than it did compared with the average of the previous 10 years, according to Nature.
After the Trump administration removed all members of the board of advisers overseeing the National Science Foundation in April, the Brennan Center for Justice described the move as “far from an outlier” and the “latest in a series of unilateral and unprecedented policy changes that have thrown American scientific research into chaos at a critical time.”
Last month, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation released a poll finding that only 50% of Americans say they trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to improve public health right now — last year’s rate was 77%.
While changes continue on a federal level, approximately 160,000 Pennsylvanians have lost or dropped health insurance coverage through the state’s exchange this year, according to the state’s Independent Fiscal Office.
“Having a system where all people don’t have access to safe, affordable and quality healthcare is not acceptable,” Rosen.
Tackling this challenge, and other health and science-related hardships, is deep within the organization’s roots, he continued.
JHF sprang from the sale of Montefiore Hospital — an Oakland-based facility that provided “culturally sensitive care” for Jewish patients and opportunities for Jewish medical professionals, while also treating individuals regardless of race, ethnicity or background. Montefiore, according to the Rauh Jewish Archives, was created by funds raised by the Hebrew Ladies Hospital Aid Society.
The task that Annie Jacobs Davis and others dedicated themselves to more than a century ago is “the work that we carry on today,” Rosen said. “So, when I look around and see the current situation, these are the challenges we’ve been dealing with. It’s been in our DNA for over 100 years.”
Rosen is no stranger to JHF. Apart from having spent nearly a decade on the foundation’s board of trustees, he formerly served as executive vice president. The Squirrel Hill resident worked alongside Karen Wolk Feinstein, former JHF president and CEO and current Alvin Rogal president and CEO emeritus. Rosen credited Feinstein and JHF staff and board members with addressing adolescent behavioral health, aging services, governance and community collaboration.
The foundation’s interests, Rosen said, align with his prior academic efforts.
“One of the great things about being at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work was that there was a real value placed on community involvement,” he said. This sentiment encouraged faculty and others tied to the program to look “for ways to partner with community-based organizations and to work with them in partnership with community members to enhance the populations they were serving.”
Rosen pointed to three such engagements. As board chair of AgeWell Pittsburgh — a collaboration between the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, JFCS and the Jewish Association on Aging — Rosen partnered with staff to ensure older adults could live “safely and independently” at home as long as possible.
The work was instructive, he said, because the idea was not to create a new agency or a new organization; instead, the question was “how do we put older adults at the center of all of our work and make it easy for them to navigate later life?”
Later, as an early board member and eventual board chair of Friendship Circle, he worked with staff to focus on “How do we put children with special needs and their families at the center of what we’re doing, and how do we start to remove labels and barriers to kids being kids?”
There was a saying he and other board members and staff would share, he told the Chronicle.
“We used to say we had a very modest goal at Friendship Circle of transforming the world,” he said. “Making the world a more inclusive and accessible space for everybody only improves the world for everybody.”
Rosen said he watched the organization grow, move to its current location on Murray Avenue and not only implement a vision within its walls but also on the wider community.
“I understood that to bring about systems change, you have to go both from the ground up and often a little bit from the top down,” he said.
As a board member of the Allegheny Regional Asset District — an organization that provides significant funding for libraries, parks and arts and culture organizations — Rosen said he partnered with staff and fellow volunteers for more than a decade to “help support and help grow some of the smallest cultural assets in our city and in the county because of the impact they were having in different neighborhoods.”
The organization’s efforts are evident, he said. “You can see the impact of where Pittsburgh ends up ranked in livable cities and affordable places, and you can see the potential for community transformation.”
Rosen, a Congregation Beth Shalom member who also attends the “new pop-up minyan,”praised JHF’s staff and board, and said he looks forward to working alongside a dedicated team to strengthen ties and enhance partnerships throughout the community.
The task ahead, Rosen noted, is, “How do we put the community at the center of what we’re doing?”
He pointed to work JHF has done in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to ensure the “agencies that are facing such dire existential threats right now” can receive more resources, and that organizations serving older adults, teens, kids and women’s health continue providing necessary care.
For decades, JHF has worked alongside partners to support vulnerable populations. Those efforts will not cease, Rosen said. The task is “something that we should all take a lot of pride in.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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