Heshbon, a visual story about Jewish communal money
Every Jewish organization on the IRS rolls stands in one city, 20,370 buildings in all. Tell us where you live and where you are in life, and we will walk you from the whole city down to your own town, light the doors you are likely to walk through, and draw the money that runs between them.
Which part of this city is yours?
We have sorted the city into fifteen neighborhoods by the kind of work each organization does. Your own town probably has a building or two in most of them.
So, what does Jewish giving build where you live?
The city is the same one drawn in The City of Jewish Giving: every organization in the IRS Business Master File that our rules read as Jewish, plus the federation roster, the largest Jewish foundations and a hand list of institutions whose legal names carry no Jewish word. Heights come from the latest fiscal year on file. Anything that files nothing stands at one short height. Each organization sits at the center of its ZIP code, and your circle is measured from the center of yours. Your town is rebuilt from the buildings inside that circle by the same rules as the big city, so its shapes, streets and parks are decorative. We always add your area's lead federation and the federation office nearest you, even when they sit outside the circle.
The rules misfile at the margins. We leave out of every town a short list of messianic ministries that the name rules let into the city, and some organizations still land in the wrong neighborhood.
Gold lines come from the Heshbon grant book, every grant on 2,335 returns filed by 265 federations and foundation arms. For grantees that received more than $1 million across fiscal 2014 to 2024, a line is the average year over those eleven years. For smaller grantees it is the average of the organization's own last three fiscal years. A line counts money from any federation or foundation arm, so it starts at the federation neighborhood rather than at one office.
The lines leaving town use the 165 federation areas in the Heshbon series and its 50-mile test of what counts as local, over eleven years of returns. JFNA's share is followed using what JFNA reports doing with its own money in each year. Gifts from donors are contributions to the area's federations and foundation arms in fiscal 2022 to 2024. Private foundations, donor-advised funds held at banks, tuition and dues are real money that this map does not trace.
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.