A service for Jewish institutions
We take commissions from federations, day schools and yeshivas, agencies, foundations and campus organizations. You send your closed books. We set them beside the records of hundreds of institutions like yours and hand back what you asked for: a private benchmark for the people who run the place, a report for the board, or a published story for donors and parents. Every chart is drawn to scale and every comparison can be traced to its source.
See the sample reportsStart a conversationMost institutions know their own numbers well and have no way to know whether those numbers are ordinary. What we supply is the comparison. Each panel below is a dataset we have already built and published from.
2,335Federations and their foundation arms
1,200+Day schools and yeshivas, cross-referenced with their tax filings
143Communities, with a modelled security bill for each
25,199grants from 50 of the largest Jewish family foundations
1,200Colleges and Hillels, with cost of attendance and Jewish life on campus
25,000Form 990 filings from Jewish nonprofits: agencies, JCCs, camps, synagogues and the rest of the field
The same analysis can stay inside the building or go out the front door. The difference is who reads it and how it looks, and you choose how far it travels.
For a head of school, executive director or finance committee who wants to know where the organization stands before anyone else asks.
Typical turnaround: three to four weeks from receiving your files.
A checkup, a report card, or a one question study ("Is our fundraising expensive?", "Are we paying for security with teachers?") written for trustees who read quickly.
Most board pieces run eight to twelve letter size pages.
An annual report, a donor report, a parent pamphlet, or a community piece that answers the question people already have: where did the money go?
The samples below are all public or board pieces.
You spend your time at the first and third steps. We spend ours on all four.
Closed books, the grant list or tuition roll, campaign records, and anything your board already sees. A signed confidentiality agreement comes first, and nothing you send is pooled into our public datasets.
We compute the same measures for you that we have published for hundreds of your peers, and we check our reading of your books with your finance staff before we write a word.
A full draft with every chart drawn from one data file. You tell us what we got wrong, what you would say differently, and what you would rather not say at all.
A print ready PDF, a web page, and the data table behind both. Next year, the same rulers again if you want to see what moved.
To show what a commissioned piece looks like, we have drawn four: two for a federation, one for a day school and one for an American Friends organization. Each has its own design and its own way of telling the story.
Opening the sample…
Turn the pages with the arrows, your keyboard, or a swipe.
| Section | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Finances | Where the money comes from and where it goes, with at least one chart drawn to scale |
| Market position | Prices, share, reach and demand, set against the institutions you compete with or serve beside |
| Peer comparison | Your measures beside published Ḥeshbon benchmarks (marked ◆) and, where none exist yet, a matched panel we build and label |
| Key metrics | A compact scorecard, each number with a plain language reading |
| Limits | What this data cannot tell you, stated before anyone has to ask |
| The answer | A closing that returns to the title question and answers it |
We have built or benchmarked work for these kinds of institutions. If yours is not on the list, the pipeline probably still reads your filing.
The best first conversation is about the question your board or your donors keep asking. Tell us what it is, what records you have, and who will read the answer, and we will tell you which of the three formats fits and what it would cost.
Write to ḤeshbonḤeshbon
חשבון, an accounting
Evidence where anecdote has been doing the work: what a Jewish household or a Jewish institution actually pays, and who decides. Most of these datasets did not exist until a piece needed them. Each one is published alongside the work, with its sources and its limits, so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
The figures here are estimates built from public filings, published price pages and survey samples, and every piece states its own sources, sample sizes and limits in place. Tax filings run a year or more behind and get restated, posted prices change without notice, and a percentage describes the sample observed rather than the whole field. Several rest on small denominators or on voluntary reporting, noted where they appear. Where a number is our own arithmetic rather than a published one, the piece says so and shows the working.
Nothing here audits an individual institution or a person, and naming an organization is not a finding about its conduct. Ḥeshbon is independent of every body named on this site. None has reviewed, approved or funded the work, and where a ranking uses another organization's published figures as an input, that organization has not endorsed the result.
This is research rather than financial, tax, legal or immigration advice, and no one should decide about their own money on these pages alone. Israeli figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that. Corrections are made on the piece itself and noted there. If something here is wrong, write and it gets fixed.
© 2026 Ḥeshbon, Center on Data and Jewish Life. Research, writing and charts by Gavriel Brown.