The Center For Jewish History, Inc.

The Center for Jewish History, Inc., a tax-exempt nonprofit organization headquartered at 15 West 16th Street in New York, operates exclusively as a federal grant recipient — not as a federal contractor or subcontractor. The Center receives project grants from cultural heritage and humanities agencies to support archival preservation, research fellowships, collections digitization, and public programming centered on Jewish history and culture.

The Center's federal grant portfolio totals $5.5 million obligated across nineteen awards, all as prime recipient. Three agencies fund the Center's work: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) accounts for fourteen awards, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for four awards, and the National Archives and Records Administration for one award. NEH dominates the funding relationship, supporting long-term scholarly fellowships, symposia, archival preservation, and infrastructure projects. IMLS funds collections management modernization and public accessibility enhancements. Recent activity has slowed — one award each in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 — after a concentration of three awards in 2022.

Representative grant work includes a $1,201,730 IMLS Museums for America project (CFDA 45.301) awarded September 1, 2026, running through August 31, 2028, to migrate more than 500,000 records from five partner organizations into a cloud-based collections management system, addressing critical security risks in the legacy platform while improving researcher access. A $350,000 NEH Promotion of the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access grant (CFDA 45.149) awarded December 1, 2023, covers 90 percent of the cost to reconstruct the building envelope of the Center's collection storage stacks in Building B, mitigating temperature and humidity fluctuations that threaten irreplaceable Jewish historical materials. A $700,000 three-year NEH Preservation and Access grant awarded September 1, 2022, supports arrangement, description, and digitization of 1,475 linear feet of Council of Jewish Federations records documenting twentieth-century American Jewish philanthropy and public service. The Center also holds a $153,292 NEH Promotion of the Humanities Research grant (CFDA 45.161) for NEH Scholar in Residence Fellowships running through August 31, 2024, and a $199,791 NEH American Rescue Plan grant awarded January 1, 2022, that retained fourteen core staff positions and one intern to sustain preservation and public-facing services during pandemic recovery.

Two awards face completion within the next twenty-four months, creating potential recompete opportunity. The Center's grant footprint reflects its institutional mission as steward of the world's largest collection of Jewish history and culture outside Israel, held collaboratively by five partner organizations. The Center does not appear in SAM.gov as a federal contractor, holds no federal contract vehicles, and maintains no subcontracting relationships.