Mark Wilf

Origins and early life

Mark Wilf was born in 1962 into a Jewish family, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth Wilf, Holocaust survivors from occupied Poland who had settled in Hillside, New Jersey, in the early 1950s.

Work and career

His father and his uncle Harry built the family real estate business, Garden Homes, and he joined it after studying at Princeton University, where he was the radio voice of the Tigers' football and basketball teams, and at New York University School of Law. In 2005 he and his brother Zygi Wilf took control of the Minnesota Vikings, with Mark as president running the club's day-to-day operations, and in 2021 he became chairman of Orlando City SC and the Orlando Pride.

His Jewish communal work took him from the presidency of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey to the national chair of the UJA Young Leadership Cabinet and of the United Jewish Communities campaign. For almost four years, until 2022, he chaired the board of trustees of the Jewish Federations of North America, and he led its national initiative for impoverished Holocaust survivors in the United States. On 10 July 2022 the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel elected him its chairman, alongside Doron Almog as Chairman of the Executive.

In that role he accompanied more than one hundred Ethiopian immigrants on their flight to Israel during Operation Tzur Israel and led a delegation supporting the Agency's relief work in Ukraine. He also sits on the boards of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Society for Yad Vashem, the Anti-Defamation League and Yeshiva University.