How many communities have taken this on?
A community kollel is a standing commitment. A group of scholars studies and teaches full-time, and the community pays for it, year after year, almost entirely through donations. Kollels charge no tuition and sell little, so what a kollel spends is, in effect, what its community gives it. That makes them a clean place to ask a practical question: what does this cost, and does it ever become self-sustaining?
The movement has been growing for decades, which makes the question pressing: more communities are taking on the recurring bill.
The line below is a running count. It begins in 1948 and steps up by one every time another community kollel opens, so it can never fall, and the only thing to read is how steeply it climbs. The scale up the left side is the number of kollels standing in that year. The shaded area beneath the line is there to make the height easy to see and carries no separate information. The tick marks along the bottom are 1970, 1990 and 2010.
Watch for the point where the line stops being nearly flat.
Half a million dollars a year, and then again next year
What does one kollel cost in a year?
Most kollels are modest operations. In a typical year, a kollel spends around half a million dollars, and most run somewhere between roughly $300,000 and $900,000. A few of the largest run past two million; the smallest get by on well under two hundred thousand.
Every dot below is one kollel in one year, placed left to right by what it spent. The dots are scattered up and down only to keep them from covering one another, so height means nothing here. The horizontal scale is logarithmic, which means each labelled step is a multiple rather than a fixed sum of money, and it is the only way to fit a kollel spending under $100k and one spending past $2M onto the same line. The gold vertical line is the median, $522k. The short bracket under the axis spans the middle half of all the kollel-years, from $301k to $878k.
Look at how much wider the whole strip is than that bracket.
If a kollel spends what it raises, what is left at the end of the year?
Almost nothing, and often less than nothing. Kollels spend close to what they take in: the typical year lands just barely in the black, and nearly two in five years end in deficit. They live on this year's giving.
The four boxes below read left to right: what a typical kollel spends in a year, what share of the money it raised is still there at year end, how often a year finishes short, and how much of a cushion most of them hold. A margin of +4.6% means 4.6 cents of every dollar raised survive the year.
The bill rises with the community
Does that bill grow as the community does?
A kollel usually begins small, a low-six-figure operation serving a young or modest community, and grows as the community around it grows. There is no single price; the cost scales with the size of the community it serves.
Three columns below, one for each stage of a kollel's life: smaller and newer on the left, established in the middle, larger and mature on the right. Height is the median annual budget for that group, and the figure printed above each column is that budget. The columns darken as they rise, which is decoration and not a second measurement.
Look at the step from the first column to the second.
Growth, when it comes, is gradual. A steady group of long-established kollels saw their combined budgets rise by about 40% over a decade, close to the pace of inflation. These are institutions that expand with their communities, not overnight.
The chart below adds six kollels together into one line. Each hollow dot is one year's combined revenue for all six, the scale up the left runs from zero past $6M, and higher is more money coming in.
Follow the dots and notice that the line does not climb smoothly.
Only the biggest and the oldest ever build a cushion
Is there a point where the giving can stop?
If a kollel runs on this year's giving, the natural question is whether it ever escapes that cycle: whether a community can grow large enough that the institution builds a cushion and stops living gift to gift. One way to see this is to measure reserves in time, how many years a kollel could operate on the savings it holds.
The answer in the data is a qualified yes, and only at the top. Most kollels hold less than a single year of expenses in reserve; a good share hold only a few weeks. But the largest and longest-running institutions have built cushions of three to six years, real endowments that begin to carry them. Reserves rise with size, and the threshold is high.
Each dot below is one kollel. Its position left to right is the annual budget, on a log scale again. Its height is reserves in time: net assets divided by annual expenses, so a dot sitting on the 2 yr gridline could keep going for two years with no new gifts at all. A dot grows larger the more years of filings that kollel has on record, and darker the deeper its reserves. The pale teal band across the top begins at two years, where a cushion starts to carry an institution rather than merely soften a bad month. The gold dashed line running up the chart is $1M of annual spending.
Notice how few dots reach into the band, and where on the chart they sit.
So: does a kollel ever pay for itself?
No, and that is the wrong test. A handful of them stop living gift to gift, which is a different and smaller claim. It happens only once a community's giving has pushed a kollel to roughly a million dollars a year and kept it there for a decade or more. Even then, what carries the institution is an accumulated cushion, not earned income, and the giving never really stops.
For most kollels that point has not arrived and may never. They remain, by design, a standing act of communal support rather than a self-funding enterprise.
What the filings can see, and what they can't
Public financial filings
For community kollels that file a full Form 990, we collected their reported revenue, expenses, and net assets by year from public IRS/ProPublica records, 2008 through 2023.
Spending as the cost
A kollel's annual expenses are the cost of running it. Because kollels charge no tuition and sell little, their revenue is essentially donations, so spending and giving track closely.
Reserves as time
We express savings as reserves in time: net assets divided by annual expenses. A value of 3 means the kollel could run about three years on what it holds, with no new gifts.
Standalone kollels only
Figures here are standalone community kollels. Where a kollel appears only inside a larger yeshiva's filing, we exclude it from these cost figures so the numbers describe kollels, not whole institutions.
What this does and doesn't show
- Small numbers. Only a modest number of kollels file full public financials, and fewer have long histories. Treat the figures as the shape of the economics, not precise universals; single large gifts can swing any one year.
- Revenue is a proxy for giving. Form 990 total revenue is overwhelmingly contributions for these organizations but can include program fees, investment returns, or one-time items.
- Reserves are not always liquid. Net assets can include buildings and restricted funds, so "years of reserve" is an upper bound on what a kollel could actually spend down.
- The self-sustaining threshold is suggestive. The link between size and reserves is real in the data but rests on a small number of large, mature institutions.
What the filings can show is the shape of a communal commitment: a recurring cost that scales with the community, met each year by giving, and only occasionally, and only at the top, cushioned by savings that begin to carry it.
