Heshbon · a visual essay
Every Jewish organization registered with the IRS, all 20,370 of them, is a building in this city. The tall ones spend the most. The lit ones show us their books. Come take the tour.
Your turn
The tour ends here, and the switches are yours. Pick a question and the buildings that answer yes light up on the map above. Pick several and choose whether a building needs to match any of them or all of them. You can also type part of a name or a city, or choose a state.
We took every organization in the IRS Business Master File that our rules read as Jewish: a clearly Jewish word in its name, or the IRS code for Judaism, or two ambiguous words together, minus Christian, Muslim, fraternal, labor and Greek-letter look-alikes. We added the federation roster, the largest Jewish foundations, and a hand list of institutions whose legal names carry no Jewish word at all. Heights come from the IRS Statistics of Income extracts, using the latest fiscal year on file for each filer. Anything that files nothing stands at one short height, because its size is unknown.
The fifteen buildings we stop at are drawn to suggest their real ones. Every other shape and facade is decorative, and so are the streets, the parks and the outline of the city. Each neighborhood is grown from a seed to the size its buildings need, its largest filers stand at its center, and the rest fill outward. The neighborhoods themselves are assigned by rule from each organization's name and IRS activity code; the rules misfile at the margins, and nobody has audited all twenty thousand rows.
The dollar figure on each neighborhood sign, and the city total, add up what the lit buildings spent in their latest year on file. Federation dependence is federation grants received over an organization's last three fiscal years, from the Heshbon federation grant book, as a share of its total revenue in those years. Reserves are net assets divided by a year of expenses. Growth and decline compare the latest full fiscal year with the year three earlier: a crane means donations rose by at least half and by at least half a million dollars; red means total revenue fell by at least thirty percent while expenses also fell by at least fifteen. Short stub periods from a change of fiscal year are left out, and private foundations are left out of both, because their income is lumpy by nature.
The same 20,370 buildings as a list, one neighborhood at a time, with everything the filings say about each one. Pick a neighborhood, search a name, a city or a tax ID, and sort by what they spend.
An organization that files nothing has no figures at all, which is why most of this list is blank. Reserves are net assets over a year of spending, left out where a year of spending is too small to divide by, and the federation share is capped at 100 percent where the grant book runs past a filer's own revenue.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.