Jewish Communal Institutions Failed the Oct. 7 Test — Mergers, Consolidations, and Closing Some Institutions Is One Answer

For years, Jewish leaders have warned of a “talent pipeline” crisis: too few professionals entering and remaining in Jewish education, campus life, advocacy, philanthropy, and communal leadership.

The concern is real. But it is incomplete. The deeper problem is not simply how many people are willing to serve. It is how much our institutions are asking them to carry, and whether the system they are being asked to sustain still works.

In short, the denominator has been ignored.

As a recent and important essay in eJewishPhilanthropy argued, every pipeline debate fixates on the numerator — how many people we recruit — while avoiding the denominator: the total scope of human capital demand created by the size, structure, and fragmentation of the Jewish communal ecosystem.

Without confronting that denominator, recruitment efforts merely reshuffle scarce talent across too many institutions, leaving core needs unmet and professionals overstretched.

Over decades, Jewish communal life accumulated organizations, programs, boards, task forces, and administrative layers designed for a different era — one marked by higher affiliation, stronger institutional loyalty, and a labor market where mission could reliably compensate for lower pay, limited mobility, and diffuse authority.

That world is gone. Demographics shifted. Younger Jews became less institutionally anchored. Labor markets tightened. Costs rose. Expectations expanded. Yet the institutional footprint remained largely unchanged.

October 7 shattered the illusion that this mismatch was manageable.

The Hamas massacre generated an extraordinary grassroots response. Jewish families mobilized instantly. Donors gave generously. Students demanded guidance and protection. Synagogues filled. Informal networks moved faster than anyone expected. The moral instinct of the Jewish people proved strong and resilient. Generosity was never the problem. The question is whether the infrastructure that received those dollars was capable of deploying them with the speed and coordination the moment required.

Institutionally, the response was uneven, slow, and often confused. Too many organizations were uncertain of their roles. Messaging diverged when unity mattered. Efforts overlapped in some areas while gaps persisted in others. Coordination lagged. Decision-making was fragmented. In a moment that demanded speed, clarity, and authority, too much of the system defaulted to process.

The fact that major Jewish organizations launched a “centralized communications operation” two months after the attack — explicitly to coordinate messaging and combat misinformation — underscored how absent such coordination had been when it was most needed.

I write this as a professor who has been on the front lines since October 7. Students came to me desperate for guidance, support, and protection. They wanted to know what Jewish organizations could offer them. Too often, the answer was unclear — or silence.

Campus Hillels struggled with mixed messages. National organizations issued statements but offered little in the way of rapid, tangible support. Meanwhile, campuses became hotbeds of antisemitism, and Zionist students were left feeling abandoned and isolated. The grassroots impulse was there. The institutional response was not.

This was not a failure of values or commitment. It was a failure of structure.

Crises do not create institutional weaknesses; they expose them. October 7 was a stress test, and it revealed a Jewish communal ecosystem that is too fragmented, too duplicative, and too bureaucratically slow for the world we now inhabit. To deny that is not loyalty. It is denial.

Ask any director of a small Jewish nonprofit what keeps them up at night, and they will not say “lack of mission.” They will say: understaffing, unclear mandates, and the slow grind of doing three jobs at once.

Young Jewish professionals increasingly encounter a sector defined by unclear authority, overlapping missions, underwhelming compensation, and relentless expectations. They are asked to staff too many institutions doing too much of the same work, often with insufficient support and limited prospects for advancement.

When they leave, their departure is framed as a generational failing — an unwillingness to commit. In reality, it is often a rational response to structural failure. Leading Edge research confirms this pattern: in 2023, Jewish nonprofits scored 13 percentage points below the national benchmark on employee well-being, and subsequent studies found that professionals in the field “lacked hope.”

This is where the conversation must become more honest — and more uncomfortable.

The redundancy in the Jewish world is frequently defended in the language of pluralism or innovation. In practice, it drains resources, dilutes leadership, and spreads scarce talent thin. Every additional board requires time and labor. Every duplicated back office diverts dollars from mission. Every institution preserved solely because it already exists is a tax on the entire ecosystem.

Mergers, consolidation, and shared services are not threats to Jewish life. They are prerequisites for its resilience.

Other sectors confronted this reality years ago. Healthcare systems consolidated to improve coordination and responsiveness — with over 2,000 hospital mergers since 1998 and health system affiliation rising from 53% to 68% of community hospitals.

Universities merged or shared infrastructure in response to demographic decline, with more than 120 colleges closing or merging since 2016. Philanthropic networks streamlined operations to focus on outcomes rather than overhead. These changes were painful, controversial, and necessary. Recent Jewish consolidations — Leading Edge absorbing JPRO, Birthright Israel merging with Onward Israel, the formation of Prizmah from legacy day school networks — offer models worth studying, however imperfect.

None of this is easy for Jewish organizations to hear. Jewish communal institutions are shaped by history, trauma, and hard-won survival. Many were built in response to real threats — antisemitism, exclusion, displacement — and their leaders understandably equate institutional continuity with communal safety. Consolidation can feel like vulnerability. Change can feel like erosion. Letting go of autonomy can feel like surrender.

But history teaches a harder truth: Jewish communities do not disappear because they adapt. They disappear because they refuse to. Institutions that cannot reform in response to demographic, cultural, and political change eventually hollow out, even if their names remain on the door. Survival has never meant stasis. It has always meant disciplined adaptation; preserving purpose while altering form.

Funders bear particular responsibility here. Philanthropy has too often rewarded proliferation over consolidation, novelty over coordination, and institutional survival over systemic health.

If donors continue to fund duplication, they should not be surprised when talent shortages worsen and crisis response falters. Those serious about Jewish continuity must prioritize impact, accountability, and coordination even when that requires difficult tradeoffs.

Jewish life still generates immense moral energy. The instinct to gather, to defend, to educate, and to create meaning remains strong. But that energy is now being poured into a system built for yesterday’s realities.

October 7 was a warning. If Jewish communal leaders continue to expand expectations without restructuring capacity — if they refuse to confront the denominator alongside the numerator — they will not be prepared for the next crisis. And there will be a next one.

The choice is not between tradition and change. It is between adaptation and decline. 

Every board, funder, and executive should be asking a simple question: If this institution did not exist today, would we create it? And if the answer is no, what are we prepared to do about it?

Ignoring that question is not conservatism. It is complacency.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.