Finances cloud the joy of great Jewish education

Several Jewish groups told JNS that they are ready to help, as Jewish Americans, like all Americans, are struggling with price increases.

Some 55% of Americans say affordability is the main issue as Election Day approaches in November, according to a recent Gallup poll.

“There’s no real middle class anymore in the community,” said Baruch Niebloom, founder of the financial tech nonprofit frum.finance, which works with Orthodox Jews. “So many people are getting tuition discounts from schools, because they don’t have the income.”

“It’s not only people who are struggling. It’s people who are wondering if they’re OK to retire, if they can afford a house, if they’re just starting out, if they’re newlyweds, first job, whatever it may be,” Stacey Zrihen, a financial planner who volunteers with the Orthodox Union’s Living Smarter Jewish program, told said.

Zrihen trains a team of about 100 volunteer coaches, and she deals with a community that doesn’t tend to have a written budget. Financial planning “hasn’t historically been taught in schools,” she said.

“I think parents, who are doing a great job educating their kids Judaically, are not always doing a great job educating them financially,” she said.

Both those in their mid-40s and 50s and younger couples, “who are just starting out, who don’t have a great blueprint for what it looks like,” are having difficulty, according to Zhiren, who said that the OU program gets thousands of annual requests.

“The clients that we’re working with are struggling more than in the past,” she said. “When I got married 33 years ago, the costs of our home, our car, those costs have multiplied — some of them even tenfold.”

Even as nearly every household now needs to bring in two incomes, there is a limit to revenue, and families ought to focus on cutting costs, according to Zhiren.

“I call it the household black hole category,” she said, of purchases from stores like Amazon, Target, Walmart and Costco, which she said often go beyond necessities.

“I think there are people who are taking vacations, because it’s something that we do and we’d like to do,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing if you can do it, but I don’t think that has to be something that’s considered a necessity.”

“If it is, the way that it’s done might look a little different if you’re trying,” Zhiren said.

She said other areas, like hiring cleaners, sleep-away camp and dining out, can be cut back if necessary.

Rabbi Shalom Goodman, co-founder and executive director of Collective Kindness, formed in 2023 to support Jewish families navigating financial challenges, said that he left a Wall Street Journal editorial role in 2024 after seeing the Jewish communal struggles.

“I heard about a family around Passover that did not have enough food, and I just asked around, ‘Who wants to help out’?” he said. “I got around $5,000 in under half an hour.”

“If you help out a guy, it always ends up with you helping others,” Rabbi Goodman said. “It evolved.”

The project went from aiming to give families a little extra money to Rabbi Goodman realizing that families earning $80,000 or more could be underwater.

Debt appeared to him to be the primary culprit, so he paired families with financial experts who could help dig them out of debt. But then he found that some in that field were dishonest and prioritized making money off those in debt rather than helping them get out of debt.

He isn’t sure if the debt problem in the Jewish community has worsened of late, but Collective Kindness has expanded its operations. As its services become better known, “a lot of people are opening up. ‘Hey, I’ll be honest, I do have high APR debts’,” he said.

People who register for his nonprofit’s Kosher Debt Help initiative report average credit card debt of more than $60,000, with average interest rates over 23%.

One-time emergency help is a specialty of the Jewish community, Rabbi Goodman said, but debt can be an endless cycle that calls for deeper solutions.

Niebloom, of frum.finance and a former senior software engineer at HubSpot, said that “what we found is a lot of other organizations are focused on either putting out the fire directly or on very short-term planning of just how to do cash flow, which leaves a lot of gaps.”

Many Orthodox Jews fear that increasing their incomes will lead to losing government benefits that they need, but Niebloom tells them that they can avoid that by making the right financial decisions.

The goal of frum.finance is to “take away this pattern we see, this general anxiety” and help formulate long-term goals on paper, getting them down to defined numbers, “instead of them being like these nebulous ideas in the back of their heads,” he said.

Of more than 1,000 members affiliated with frum.finance, including 300 families involved in deep planning, he hasn’t seen increased stress and anxiety from the current economy, he said, “because I feel like people were almost maxed out before things were rough.”