Sylvan Adams

Origins and early life

Sylvan Adams was born in Quebec City on 1 November 1958, the son of Marcel Adams, born Abramovich, a Holocaust survivor from Romania who became one of Canada's great real estate developers.

Work and career

For close to twenty-five years he was president and chief executive of Iberville Developments, the property company his father had founded, before he made aliyah at the end of 2015 and settled in Tel Aviv. He took up cycling in his forties, won a masters world championship in Manchester in 2017 and, in Scotland in August 2023, his first world title as an Israeli, in the 65 to 69 age group. He co-owns the professional team Israel-Premier Tech, which has raced the Tour de France, and he brought the start of the 2018 Giro d'Italia to Israel, the first time any stage of the race was held outside Europe.

In 2017 he founded the Sylvan Adams Cycling Network at Tel Aviv University, the country's first cycling institute, and in 2018 he built in Tel Aviv the first velodrome in the Middle East.

Recognition

Through his family foundation he has supported the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the SpaceIL moon mission and Save a Child's Heart, and he has funded an emergency wing in Tel Aviv and a children's hospital in Holon. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 he gave 100 million dollars to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to help rebuild the south, and in November 2025 he pledged 100 million dollars more to rebuild Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, struck by an Iranian missile that June.

He traces his Zionism to his parents' survival of the Holocaust and to his father's service in Israel's War of Independence, and in 2023 he lit a torch at Israel's 75th Independence Day ceremony on behalf of the Jews of the Diaspora. In 2025 he was unanimously appointed president of the World Jewish Congress Israel, and TIME named him to its first list of the hundred most influential people in philanthropy.