This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Jewish Federations of North America is the product of a 1999 merger, when the Council of Jewish Federations, an umbrella body for local Jewish charitable federations dating to 1932, combined with the United Jewish Appeal, a fundraising vehicle organized in 1939 to help Jewish communities facing Nazi persecution, and the United Israel Appeal into a single organization first called United Jewish Communities, renamed the Jewish Federations of North America in October 2009. That lineage, two fundraising bodies and a communal umbrella folding into one, explains what JFNA is: not a synagogue movement or a denominational body, but a transdenominational fundraising and communal welfare structure sitting above roughly 141 local Jewish Federations across North America.
That structure was built for exactly the kind of year 2024 turned out to be. JFNA's own November 2025 report states the Federation system raised and distributed 3 billion US dollars during 2024, a record year the report itself describes as about a billion dollars above a typical one, driven by a 683 million dollar Israel Emergency Campaign launched after the 7 October 2023 attacks and the war that followed, on top of 1.1 billion dollars raised through the ordinary Annual Campaign.
The Federation model's transdenominational character is part of why that surge was possible so quickly: because JFNA and its local Federations exist to fund social welfare, education and communal needs across Jewish community life broadly, rather than to serve one stream of Judaism, a single emergency campaign could draw on donors across Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and unaffiliated Jewish communities alike, through the same fundraising infrastructure moving money for Jewish communal needs since the 1930s.