In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres, the Jewish world mobilized rapidly, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for relief efforts in a matter of weeks, easily surpassing $1 billion by the end of the year.  

In addition to the top-down efforts by national and international organizations, countless grassroots initiatives emerged to support soldiers and reservists, the survivors of the attacks, the families of the bereaved, evacuees from the country’s south and the north, farmers, local businesses and virtually anyone affected by the attacks. Israeli reservists on vacation abroad returned in the thousands, with airline tickets purchased through donations. Diaspora communities purchased and shipped gear to soldiers on the front lines. 

Jewish American philanthropy, feared to have been in a slump, proved its resilience, with new donors joining the fray and existing donors increasing their gifts in those first few months.

“There is no question that the events of Oct. 7 were a clarion call for many Jews in the U.S. as they realized that events in Israel impacted them personally on many levels,” said Ariel Zwang, CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, one of the main beneficiaries of that philanthropic support. “They responded with an outpouring of support, and we raised $102 million for our Israel Emergency Campaign, which was above and beyond regular Israel giving over the subsequent 2-year period.”

The Jewish Federations of North America and its 146 member organizations led the fundraising effort, and hundreds of Israeli nonprofits and initiatives received donations from abroad to help with medical and emergency services, mental health support, aid for victims of terror, economic needs and more. “Since Oct. 7, 2023, we’ve seen a remarkable response from Israelis and the Israeli nonprofit sector,” Rebecca Caspi, JFNA’s senior vice president of Israel and Overseas and director of its Israel office, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Jewish Federations have raised over $900 million in emergency funds for Israel and supported some 800 different NGOs.”

Now, two years later, while the war sparked by the Oct. 7 attacks appears to be coming to a close, many of the needs created and exacerbated by the crisis persist. The underlying infrastructure and institutions that are addressing those issues are struggling, and donations have dropped off. 

Despite the initial mobilization of philanthropy, the Israeli nonprofit “sector is going to need major investments to continue to meet the needs of countless Israelis who lost homes, jobs and businesses, are managing trauma and are still displaced,” Zwang told eJP. “There is a shortage of professionals across the social sector — there are simply not enough people to address the problems.”

The scale of need is immense: Millions of Israelis are estimated to be facing some kind of vulnerability, from mental health issues to unemployment, from homelessness to hunger. “Those who were already vulnerable before the conflict are now joined by new populations of vulnerable who never needed support before or have numerous challenges that require multiple interventions to aid them,” Zwang said. “Think of someone who survived the Oct. 7 atrocities, lost a business, and now has children serving in the military.”

Naomi Eisenberger, executive director of the Good People Fund, which supports small Israeli nonprofits, describes “enormous fatigue” after “five years of crisis, from the pandemic to Ukraine.” Some of her donors now restrict giving to the United States. Others limit to Israel-only work, and in some circles, “Israel is even being seen as a ‘dirty word’ — meaning organizations are forced to downplay their Israeli connections or risk losing support,” she said. 

The climate of constant crisis makes it difficult to sustain funding. “You can only cry wolf so many times,” Eisenberger said.

Both new nonprofits that sprang up and the existing ones that pivoted to address the crises that emerged from the Oct. 7 attacks are now facing challenges as they move from emergency response to long-term sustainability. Each new emergency — last year’s war against Hezbollah, this year’s war against Iran — adds burden without resolving the underlying sustainability crisis, according to Eisenberger. 

“Two years ago, we saw organizations taking on new programs, expanding their reach because funds were available,” Eisenberger said. “But now, that funding is waning, and they are left supporting programs they cannot financially sustain.”

Organizations like Saki, which works with at-risk youth, expanded dramatically with emergency funding. “The unprecedented giving from two years ago forced them to expand their programs into areas where they weren’t before,” Eisenberger said. “And now it’s two years later, that unprecedented giving isn’t there. And they’re running programs in places where they no longer have the money to support it.”

Kaima, which originally focused on farming programs for at-risk youth, expanded to serve soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The work is still needed and will likely be needed even more as active fighting comes to an end, but sustainable funding remains elusive. 

Eisenberger warned particularly about organizations that were launched in memory of terror victims or fallen soldiers. “Many of these are emotionally driven,” she said. “Once the emotional surge passes, many risk becoming dormant or inactive because their foundation was emotional rather than strategic.”

Many of these organizations received funding from Jewish federations’ or foundations’ emergency funds; now they must navigate the process of receiving more substantial multi-year grants.

The proliferation of nonprofits compounds the challenge. “There’s an unprecedented number of programs,” Eisenberger said, noting the explosion of mental health services using everything from wood carving to therapeutic writing. Struggling agricultural farms throughout the country have found a new life as therapeutic farms for veterans with PTSD.

As large, established nonprofits already have robust fundraising capabilities and can more easily scale their programs, this creates what Eisenberger calls a “rich get richer” dynamic. Zwang, whose JDC is one of Israel’s larger social services providers, acknowledged this as well, saying there is an increasingly “crowded NGO field in Israel” that is fighting over the same exhausted donor pool. 

Yet some smaller organizations nevertheless thrive. Ten Gav, which provides basic needs like beds, appliances and stipends to struggling Israeli families, simply added emergency financial assistance for reservist families. “We are not afraid of our sustainability; we simply exist to meet urgent needs anyway,” Anna Menzies Hecht, director of development for Ten Gav, told eJP. “It was perhaps easier than for some other organizations that had to do a big rethink and restructure.”

Two years on, Ten Gav’s donors remain engaged. “We don’t sense the fatigue — yet!” Menzies Hecht said. “We have upped our communications and kept closely in touch, introducing more regular reporting.” Her strategy focuses on maintaining the close connection built during the crisis. “Looking ahead, I think donors — especially the new ones — will expect the close connection built during this time to continue,” she noted. “Keeping them engaged and ‘in the room’ will be key to long-term support.”

Jay Shofet, the director of partnerships and development at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, tells a similar story. “Our feeling here is there hasn’t been much falloff in terms of sustainability,” he said. “All our big donors have continued or raised their donations.”

SPNI’s stability reflects decades of strategic planning, he noted. “For 30 years or more, we have been talking about how we can’t rely on Diaspora funding,” Shofet said. “Organizations need to have various forms of revenue streams.” SPNI cultivated domestic donors — 20% are English-speaking Israelis — and attracts new environmental funding through sources like the Jewish Climate Trust.

SPNI donors who love Israel and its nature but do not align politically with its government policies feel good about supporting the organization and its version of Israel, which buffers the organization from the political divides that can challenge other Israeli nonprofits. “Protecting nature in Israel is a good way of supporting Israel without supporting what the government does,” Shofet said.

The influx of emergency funding has also led to surprising challenges for some organizations. 

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre and the massive evacuation of citizens, the humanitarian group IsraAid shifted to providing disaster relief in Israel for the first time. The group raised $20 million and hired 200 people for Israel relief work. CEO Yotam Polizer said that the organization still works in 12 countries around the world — but funding them is “extremely challenging.”

“People with strong ties to Israel now focus all their giving on the current crisis,” Polizer said. “It’s extremely challenging to secure support for our multi-country work when donors are laser-focused on Gaza and Israel.”

Ukraine, once the “center of attention,” now receives “zero attention” despite worsening conditions, he said. “The conflict in Ukraine has become a ‘canary in the coal mine’ — showing how quickly donor attention can shift away from long-term crises once a more immediate threat emerges in Israel,” Polizer observed.

On the one hand, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza acted as a “magnet” for new donors, especially Jewish supporters concerned about humanitarian crises but previously disengaged with Israel’s broader development needs, Polizer said. But the same is not true for the group’s Israeli donors, he noted. “It’s a challenge to get people’s attention to stuff that’s on the other side of the world.”

Policy research faces its own particular challenges. Nir Kaidar, CEO of the Taub Center social policy think tank, said that fundraising has become “much more difficult since the war,” despite the organization’s focus on the types of issues that philanthropists care about.

“It’s always been hard to fund our research but since this war it’s become harder” for two reasons: funding flows to direct assistance, and international Jewish philanthropy focuses increasingly on antisemitism and at-risk Diaspora communities like Ukraine. “So a lot of that funding is not coming to Israel and if it is, it’s diverted to those areas of immediate relief.”

Taub maintains a strong, loyal donor base, with many serving on its board. But finding new income sources has proven difficult. The organization has focused research on areas of foundation interest — shifting more toward mental health, for example, where “there are a lot of foundations for whom that is on their agenda.”

Kedar stressed that this is not “a donor-driven mission pivot,” but rather a function of what Israeli civil society is facing, similar to how Taub pivoted to employment research during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The most important thing for us is to do research that will be useful in impacting policy and government ministries,” he said.

The question for Israeli nonprofits becomes: Which organizational models can sustain themselves through both sustained emergencies and periods of calm?

Organizations must now “handle both short and long term simultaneously,” Zwang said. 

This multilayered reality — evacuees needing immediate support, trauma survivors requiring long-term care, fresh attacks requiring emergency responses — hinders the transition from emergency to recovery that traditional philanthropic models anticipate, interviewees said. This summer, when the Israel-Iran war broke out, UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein told eJP that the organization had just started to shift its focus to Israel’s “chronic needs” when the deadly Iranian barrages forced it to pivot back to emergency response.

After launching the “Israel Emergency Campaign” in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, JFNA recently pivoted to “Rebuild Israel” as its new “national framework for the longer term and critical work,” with all 146 federations participating. “We remain as committed as ever to our work in Israel,” Caspi said.

Some organizations that are built for emergency response, such as Ten Gav, can absorb the whiplash. But constant pivoting is taking a toll on other organizations. 

For Israeli nonprofits navigating perpetual crisis, and for the American Jewish philanthropic system that has supported them since 1948, managing that uncertainty will determine which organizations survive and which fall apart.