American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Known today simply as JDC, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee remains a leading global Jewish humanitarian organization, active across more than seventy countries from the Former Soviet Union to Ethiopia and well beyond both regions. It is supported primarily by general contributions, funds from The Jewish Federations of North America and funds from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and, as a US-registered nonprofit organization, it files an annual Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service, made public through services such as ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer database.

JDC's own consolidated financial statements, independently audited by Grant Thornton LLP with an unmodified opinion dated 27 June 2025, report total revenues, gains and other support of 420,246,993 US dollars and total expenses of 382,025,692 US dollars for the year ended 31 December 2024, of which 345,364,254 dollars was spent on program services, including 217,459,234 dollars in grants to supported organizations and affiliates worldwide that carry out the work on the ground each year.