Nearly three years after the Oct. 7 terror attacks triggered a wave of emergency giving to Jewish causes, Jewish Federations of North America officials say that campaign has transformed into lasting growth in its donor base, bucking both broader trends and the organization’s own trajectory.

As Jewish philanthropy — and philanthropy in general —is defined by more and more money being given by fewer and fewer big donors, JFNA said that it saw a 2.7% increase in donors to local Jewish federations between 2023 and 2025, bringing the total to around 290,000 donors.

“If you work in Jewish communal fundraising, 2.7% is pretty big. When you’re talking about the overall number that we’re talking about, it’s a pretty incredible trend,” David Heller, JFNA’s former national campaign chair, told eJP.

Prior to Oct. 7, 2023, JFNA had been seeing a “slow decline,” both in the number of donors and the number of dollars raised, said Heller. A recent survey by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that overall, the number of philanthropic donors decreased by 3.6% from 2024 to 2025.

The organization also reported a 15.4% increase in its annual campaign in the 2025 fiscal year, its largest increase in a decade. According to a statement, that increase was “primarily driven by increased contributions from existing donors,” though Heller asserted that even still, the larger number of donors had a significant impact. 

“We’re not raising more dollars from a smaller base, which was what was happening. This is truly a larger number from a larger number of donors,” said Heller.

In 2023, Hamas terror attacks and the war that followed sparked JFNA’s Israel Emergency Campaign, which raised more than $900 million. Within the organization, that sparked questions about whether the increase in funding and funders would taper off with time, or stick around, said Niv Elis, associate vice president of communications at JFNA. 

“What I think that we’ve seen is that the answer is yes,” said Elis. “They’re not just giving to this one emergency cause, but they’re actually engaged.”

After the emergency campaign, many donors who were brought in by it were retained and gave to their local Jewish communities, said Elis, with the vast majority of funding going to local communities, specifically to support Jewish education, camps, JCCs and other areas that “support flourishing Jewish life.”

Heller described the growth as distributed broadly, as opposed to concentrated among the largest federations, citing Columbus, Ohio, where the annual campaign doubled from about $6 million to $12 million.

“As I was traveling the country, it was in every market that I was in,” Heller said. “We were seeing increases, and that’s what is really special about this: it was happening everywhere.”