Jewish Community Relations Council

A Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) is a locally based Jewish organization that carries out "action agendas on behalf of and in the name of the local Jewish communities." Councils may aim "to represent the consensus of the organized Jewish community" in the cities in which they operate, and then assist in consulting other local stakeholders on matters of importance to Jewish community values. In the United States, JCRCs are affiliated with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) organization, and relate to that national organization in a variety of ways.

Description
Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRC) are Jewish local advocacy arms in the United States. Most major centers of Jewish populations have a JCRC, and are either constituent departments of the local Jewish federation, totally independent, or functioning as a joint office. Typically, the board of directors of a JCRC include local representatives of national organizations and local synagogues.

The key to the uniqueness of JCRCs compared to other Jewish communal entities is that they are locally-based bodies and carry out action agendas on behalf of and in the name of the local Jewish communities.

History
JCRCs came into being in the 1930s to provide a means for coordination of defense activity within a community, as local communities were not content to leave this activity solely to national defense organizations like the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League, which rarely consulted with each other or with local leadership. Like these national organizations, JCRCs focused primarily on combatting antisemitism.

In 1944, the National Community Relations Advisory Council (later renamed the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) was formed as an umbrella organization of 14 local JCRCs, the ADL, the two AJCs, and the Jewish Labor Committee, in the United States. In 2000, the JCPA counted among its membership 120 JCRCs.

According to Professor Daniel Elazar, from the 1950s, the JCRCs with the JCPA and federations played the largest role in Jewish representation. Their importance increased by the early 21st century as Jewish organizational life, along with national life in general, became more and more decentralized.