American Jewish University finds new buyer for its campus: The Jewish school next door
American Jewish University’s Familian campus in 2021. Photo by Zach Golden
By Louis Keene December 27, 2023
After American Jewish University’s sale of its main campus to a Switzerland-based corporation fell through this summer, the school went back to the drawing board to search for a buyer.
It didn’t have to look very far.
Milken Community School, a nondenominational Jewish school that shares a Los Angeles hilltop with AJU, announced Tuesday it had reached a deal to buy the 22-acre campus.
Milken head of school Sarah Shulkind called the acquisition “a historic moment for the Jewish community,” qualifying that steps needed to be completed to finalize it, in a statement on the school’s website.
“We have always been interested in the site, its proximity to Milken’s main site made it extremely interesting, and the fact that it was really built with Jewish philanthropic dollars,” Shulkind said Wednesday in an interview. “We want to continue the legacy that was created there and this gives the community the opportunity to do so.”
Terms of the deal, which does not include the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley, were undisclosed.
Both sides of the transaction hope it closes a nearly two-year saga over the sale of the Familian Campus, a verdant but often near-vacant Bel Air facility that hosts the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies and several AJU graduate programs.
Local Jewish leaders — and donors who had helped fund its construction in the decades since its founding as the University of Judaism in 1947 — hoped the campus, which featured the only non-Orthodox mikvah for hundreds of miles and a Jewish library touted as the largest west of the Mississippi River, would stay in community possession, and Milken had long seemed the natural buyer.
Situated on six-and-a-half acres just on the other side of the 405 Freeway from AJU, Milken has nearly 800 students in grades 6-12, and Shulkind had spoken openly about the highly regarded school’s desire to expand. But it was not only AJU’s classrooms that it coveted. In spite of what some observers described as millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, the Familian Campus’ assets — among them a synagogue and a theater — still shone brightly.
Milken could also make use of AJU’s football field — it is one of the only Jewish schools in the country with a tackle football team — and its ceramics studio.
It pursued a partnership with AJU to share the campus in 2019 that never materialized. And after AJU announced it was selling “all or part” of it in February 2022, Milken entered the bidding.
But AJU, which has been led by President Jeffrey Herbst since 2018, made no secret that its priority was to find the highest bidder. While the school has wound down much of its in-person activities, it offers a range of online courses, including an Intro to Judaism course popular with people exploring conversion, that flourished during the pandemic.
In September 2022 it announced a sale to EF Education First, an international company specializing in language learning. The Forward reported the value of the deal, whose terms were never specified publicly, at around $65 million — only about $5 million more than the package Milken was offering, sources said at the time.
The deal fell through months later over concerns raised by residents nearby who did not approve of EF’s plan to increase the number of people on campus. An EF executive, announcing in June that the company was backing out of the deal, described the neighbors as communicating “in ways that made us increasingly uncomfortable.”
The Ziegler School, a Conservative rabbinical school, will relocate to West Los Angeles. It is unclear where the other graduate schools are headed. The AJU undergraduate program stopped taking new students in 2018.
In a statement Wednesday, Herbst said he looked forward to working in the weeks ahead to finalizing the deal.
“While the sale is not yet complete, we are very excited about this opportunity — and its potential to significantly advance the missions of both AJU and Milken,” he said.
Shulkind, who declined to say how much Milken paid, called the deal “a success story for us all.”
“The narrative of day schools has really been a struggling one,” she said. “And I think that this has the opportunity to really turn that narrative both for Milken and for the Jewish Los Angeles community as a whole, and hopefully for Jewish education.”
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which had flirted with the idea of bidding on the campus, warmly greeted news of the sale.
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