Our Story  

In Cuba, we supported European Jewish refugees in partnership with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee. By 1940, we are helping Jewish refugees in 40+ countries.

At the end of World War II, Allied forces set up displaced persons (DP) camps to house hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the war. JDC partnered with other relief organizations to provide food, clothing, job training, education, religious materials, legal representation, and emigration assistance. By 1947, an estimated 250,000 Jewish refugees passed through DP camps, and received help from JDC.

With the new Jewish state under tremendous pressure to absorb Holocaust survivors, immigrants with disabilities, and the elderly and chronically ill, we partnered with the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Government of Israel to create Malben, a new national framework for providing care.

JDC assistance to 90,000 Jewish children throughout the Muslim world included: our partnership with OSE, a French Jewish humanitarian organization, in supporting clinics and medical installations to combat tuberculosis, trachoma, and tinea; our establishment of milk depots; and our support of summer camps and educational programs.

When Algeria became independent, nearly its entire Jewish community sought refuge in France, fleeing harassment. We helped them evacuate and supported the French Jewish community’s massive expansion of services to absorb the newcomers, as well as successive waves of North African émigrés.

We began to work in the Jewish communities of India, focusing on Jewish poverty and education. This work continues today.

JDC and the Israeli government partnered to launch ESHEL, the Association for the Planning and Development of Services for the Aged, which models projects and assists communities in organizing and financing their own programs for aging populations.

This year saw a zenith in Soviet Jewish emigration from Russia, with 51,663 refugees applying to emigrate. Since Soviet Jews could not initiate immigration applications from within the FSU, they traveled to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) processing centers in Vienna and Rome and waited while their applications were processed. For more than two decades, beginning in the 1970s, JDC provided care and maintenance, basic and emergency medical services, financial support, social services, educational, cultural, and religious programs, and housing assistance.

We provided famine relief and set up non-sectarian medical and agricultural recovery projects in Ethiopia’s Gondar Province. We also improved electrification and promote well drilling for a clean water supply.

For the first time since the liquidation of our Agro-Joint project in 1938, JDC returned to the Soviet Union, revitalizing Jewish communal infrastructures and empowering Soviet Jewry.

Camp Szarvas still serves some 1,600 Jewish campers from more than 25 countries each summer, enhancing and nurturing the Jewish identity and education of an entire generation of post-Communist Eastern European youth. JDC’s international community development team also runs year-round training seminars for young Hungarian Jewish leaders.

With the assistance of local Jewish leaders, we organized a series of 11 convoys, evacuating Muslims, Christians, and Jews out of war-torn Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

JDC assisted the Argentine Jewish community, in partnership with local organizations, through job training, cash relief, school lunches, scholarships, and baby care. At their height, JDC’s relief efforts assisted about 36,000 people.

In response to the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, JDC raised over $19 million for tsunami relief. Through partnerships with local and international NGOs, JDC implemented emergency relief and longer-term rehabilitation projects in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Since then, JDC has led the Jewish response to major disasters in Haiti (2010), Japan (2011), the Philippines (2013), Nepal (2015), the Bahamas (2019), and more.

Following Typhoon Haiyan, the catastrophic storm that claimed over 6,000 lives in the Philippines, JDC worked with its partners to rebuild classrooms and schools, restore local fishing businesses, offer medical and psychological help, and facilitate disaster preparedness.

When violence broke out in Eastern Ukraine, JDC continued to support vulnerable elderly Jews and poor families living in the conflict zone, as well as helping to resettle internally displaced people in Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv. JDC continues to support Jews who remain in places like Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

In 70 countries and across 17 time zones — JDC’s work has not skipped a beat, addressing emerging needs and helping communities adjust to this new reality. We’re safely delivering care to the most vulnerable in the former Soviet Union and beyond, helping at-risk populations in Israel, innovative and sustaining Jewish community life, and providing humanitarian aid in the developing world.