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 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known as JDC or simply "the Joint," was formed on 27 August 1914 when the American Jewish Relief Committee and the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews joined forces, after Ambassador Henry Morgenthau cabled Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff for funds to save Jews in Ottoman Palestine from wartime starvation and widespread deprivation. It was governed as a coalition of American Jewish organizations, agreed at a meeting held at Temple Emanu-El in New York, on 24 October 1914, founded specifically in New York to unify American Jewish relief funding under one single body.
Between 1914 and 1929 it collected roughly 78.7 million dollars for Jews in Palestine and war-torn Europe. Still serving over a century later as the overseas arm of the American Jewish community, JDC sponsors programs of relief, rescue and reconstruction to meet Jewish needs around the globe, and, as its programs in Israel serve all populations at risk, it aids non-Jewish populations as well, an extension of its original wartime mandate that has never since been narrowed.