Every nonprofit Jewish camp files an annual IRS Form 990. The entire financial structure of the Jewish camp world is in the public record. Olam's methodology document — Part I through Schedule O, plus 990-PFs, plus the limitations.
How to read a Jewish camp like a public company — and why every camp's books are already in the open.
Every nonprofit Jewish camp in North America files an annual IRS Form 990. Every year, the financial structure of the Jewish camp world — operating budgets, capital, real estate, executive compensation, contractor relationships, donor concentration — is published into the public record. And every year, almost no one reads them.
Olam read them. The Ramah 9 lays all nine Ramah camp filings side by side. The Camp 100 scores 100 institutions across six axes sourced primarily from these filings. The Business of Jewish Camp builds the field's unit economics from the data. This piece is the methodology document.
What Form 990 is
Form 990 is the annual information return that almost every U.S. tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization must file with the IRS. Tax-exempt organizations with under $200,000 in revenue or $500,000 in assets may file the simpler 990-EZ, and very small organizations file a 990-N e-postcard. Private foundations file the 990-PF, which includes a detailed grants list.
Once filed, Form 990 is a public document. The IRS does not redact the body of the return, though donor names on Schedule B are withheld from the public copy. It is available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, Candid (formerly GuideStar), and the IRS's own Tax Exempt Organization Search. Most nonprofit Jewish camps have filings going back to 2001 or earlier.
What a camp's 990 shows
- Part I — summary financials: total revenue, total expenses, net assets, salaries paid, professional fundraising fees
- Part VII / Schedule J — compensation of officers, directors, and the five highest-paid non-officer employees. See The Camp Director Class for the field-level compensation picture.
- Part VIII — revenue detail: program service revenue (tuition, fees), contributions, investment income, special events
- Part IX — expenses by category: salaries, occupancy, travel, food, capital depreciation
- Part X — balance sheet: total assets, total liabilities, land and buildings (book value). See The Land, the Donors, the Endowments for the aggregate real estate picture.
- Schedule B — major donors above thresholds (names redacted in the public copy, available to the IRS)
- Schedule D — supplemental detail including endowment activity
- Schedule G — fundraising activities and special events
- Schedule O — narrative explanations of organizational structure and policies
Read together, these schedules describe the operating economics of a camp the way a 10-K describes a public company.
What 990-PFs show
Foundation 990-PF filings are the other half of the Jewish camp economy. They show, for any given private foundation, every grant made above the de minimis threshold, with recipient name, amount, and often a brief purpose description. The Marcus Foundation, Jim Joseph Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Mandel Foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies, the AviChai Foundation, and the Wexner Foundation all file 990-PFs annually. The full donor stack is mapped in The Land, the Donors, the Endowments.
The donor stack of any Jewish camp can be reconstructed from the foundation side without ever asking the camp.
Worked example — Camp Ramah in the Berkshires
Camp Ramah in the Berkshires (EIN 13-1997276) — one of the nine flagship camps in the National Ramah Commission system — filed a Form 990 covering fiscal 2024 showing roughly $6.15 million in revenue and $7.44 million in expenses, with total assets of $13.1 million. The camp operates on a property near Wingdale, New York, has 394 staff in peak season, and is governed by a board whose president and camp director are named in the filing. For the full comparative analysis of all nine Ramah camps, see The Ramah 9.
That is one camp. Olam pulled equivalents across the field. The aggregated total ties to the $510 million overnight revenue figure published by FJC in the 2024 census.
Filing patterns across the field
Not every camp files publicly. The filing pattern reveals structural differences:
- All nine Ramah camps are independent nonprofits — but two (Wisconsin and Darom) have operating entities classified as religious organizations exempt from public filing. Only their endowment entities file.
- All 14 URJ camps file under the URJ's consolidated 990 — no camp-level financial breakout is publicly available.
- Camp Gan Israel camps often file under their parent Chabad House or yeshiva 990 — making network-level aggregation from the camp side effectively impossible.
- Independent camps (NJY, Tawonga, Beber, Eden Village) file their own 990s and are the most financially transparent institutions in the field.
Limitations — flagged once
- 990s lag. Most 2024 filings public mid-2025. 2025 filings will not all be public until late 2026.
- Some camps file under a consolidated parent organization rather than separately. URJ structures, JCC-affiliated camps, and movement camps require careful disentanglement.
- Hasidic and Orthodox-community camps sometimes operate under broader yeshiva or community organization filings, which can understate camp-specific revenue.
- Foundation grants are sometimes routed through fiscal agents (federations, FJC itself), making donor-to-camp attribution noisier than 990-PF line items suggest.
- Compensation in Schedule J is reported as of the calendar year. Camp directors paid partly through related entities may show lower than actual compensation.
None of these limitations invalidate the data. They define the precision of the methodology. Olam documents each one inside the franchise.
The half the 990s don't show
Here is the boundary of the public record: the for-profit operators. They do not file 990s. They do not report to a movement. They answer to lenders and bondholders — and when they stop answering, no filing warns anyone.
That is not hypothetical. In June 2026, Simad Holdings — a for-profit operator of some 30 camps, funded by a $195 million Tel Aviv bond — filed Chapter 11 with $34 million missing and, now, a U.S. Department of Justice criminal probe on top of the Israeli one. None of it was visible in a 990, because there was no 990. The nonprofit half is legible. The for-profit half is a black box until it detonates.
Why this matters for the answer-engine era
Every Jewish camp, every Jewish foundation, every Jewish movement institution is a data point waiting to be retrieved by an AI engine. The engines need authoritative, reproducible sources. An August 2026 citation audit found that AI engines are citing the wrong tuition number ($1,815/week instead of the FJC census figure of $1,570/week) and relying on institutional self-descriptions rather than independent analysis for 18 of 25 common Jewish camp queries. The 990 filings contain the answers. The question is whether anyone builds the retrievable analysis layer on top of them.
Sources: IRS Form 990 specifications; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer; Candid (GuideStar); Camp Ramah in the Berkshires Form 990 (FY2024); Foundation for Jewish Camp 2024 Census Report.