Bringing Everyone Together: The Successes, Pitfalls, and Positive Outcomes of a Merger

Created in 2016, Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools was a new organization founded following the merger of five separate national day school organizations, which were primarily organized around religious denominations. The impetus? Day school enrollment was down nationally, organizational leaders saw the opportunity to break down unnecessary denominational gaps, each organization was struggling financially with only limited collaboration among them, and they were all dependent on one national funder (The AVI CHAI Foundation), which would be completing a spenddown in just a few short years.

The status quo was untenable. There was no viable path forward for five separate organizations focusing on the same sector. There wasn’t just an opportunity to create something new, there was a need. – Paul Bernstein, CEO, Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools

UpStart merged in 2017 with three other organizations—Bikkurim, Joshua Venture Group, and PresenTense—that all operated in the Jewish innovation space. Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, led by Jonathan Woocher, z”l, was funding all four groups and planted the seed with some financial support for the organizations to explore what a merger would look like. Funders wanted a central address for innovation and an organization that could hold larger grants. This would be a merger of effectiveness, not efficiencies, and funders would need to step up to make it happen.

Collaboration made a lot of sense, but we didn't know what that would look like. Our driving mandate was strategy first, structure second. – Aaron Katler, CEO, UpStart

In 2025, following some on-again, off-again discussions, Leading Edge and JPro decided to merge under the Leading Edge banner. Both organizations’ leaders recognized that the market had shifted—they would soon have all the same funders—and that they were addressing increasingly similar challenges regarding leadership and organizational health in the Jewish nonprofit sector.

The need was, and is, great. Why are we atomizing the field when we can come together? Our mentality was to figure out how we do that. – Gali Cooks, President and CEO, Leading Edge

In some ways, Gali, Aaron, and Paul had similar experiences through their merger process. In other ways, they took away different lessons and insights because each merger, and their role in it, was different.

Due diligence is critical. We tackled the most important issues first, in part to help determine if we were positioned to move forward. Our conversations at this stage were both highly relational and highly confidential. Many of the personal relationships in Leading Edge’s and JPro’s worlds overlapped, so we had to respect that. Once we determined that we would move forward, we dove into the details of the terms, which of course can be complicated and filled with compromise and, in some cases, sacrifice.

We already went through a similar process in 2020 when we acquired Boardified. We learned then and in this instance how important the pace of the process is. We got bogged down at times dealing with certain frictions between our organizations. In the end, we realized that most of those issues didn’t matter because the ultimate outcome—a new, stronger, more effective organization—is what’s best for the people we serve and the field. We also found that an external facilitator was critical to work through things with the teams involved, see where there was exact mission alignment, and other areas where resources, and perhaps people, would need to shift.

You can’t get around the fact that feelings and emotions are involved—strategic, adaptive leadership is important. Being as clear as possible about what’s occurring—both with internal teams and funders—can be challenging at the moment, but it sets up the new organizations for success down the road. I’m proud that we’ve emerged as a central address for all talent. - Gali Cooks

While every scenario is different, I agree with Gali that a merger is a highly relational experience. The personalities and egos of those involved set the tone for what the process and experience will be like. I certainly include myself and UpStart in that reflection. In hindsight, we were stubborn at times (I came on board right as we decided if a merger was the right path forward). It’s very understandable that people are worried about their future and protecting their previous efforts and accomplishments.

I’ve come to realize that the technical parts of a merger are not that complicated. Of course it might be a pain to deal with a state attorney general or to redraft certain documents, but most of the experience is, as Gali noted, an adaptive challenge. That's where the complexity is. You have to manage the loss for a variety of stakeholders, whether they're staff, board members, or past participants.

For example, we at UpStart were scared to lose our brand, including our name. We felt strongly we needed to keep that. But updating the name to more clearly state who we are and what we do—like Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools—would have been a better approach. I always tell people now, ‘Let go of anything you feel like you need to hold on to and look at it with fresh eyes unless there's a real business case for it.’ - Aaron Katler

In our case, we certainly had large mission alignment among five organizations. Our challenge was where to put boundaries of sorts around what our new organization would address. What would we include, and equally important, what would we not include in our mandate that the other separate organizations had addressed previously?

Our “working thesis” was that the different schools served by the five organizations had more in common than they had differences, but we had to test that out. Would the organizations actually work together? We didn’t want to create such a behemoth of an organization that it broke apart at the seams. Defining those parameters involved a set of strategic decisions.

A significant aspect of our merger, and related to Aaron’s point about the name, was the decision that none of the previous organizations would be in any way dominant; a new name would be selected to reflect this principle. School leaders were actively involved in creating the organization; choosing the name Prizmah, for example, was the result of proposals invited from the field. It was important to create a sense that the community as a whole was a part of shaping this new chapter in day school development. They created a new board led by a fantastic board chair, Kathy Manning, who was not previously involved, and then brought me on board as the founding CEO—someone from outside of the founding organizations. The message they were sending was clear: This was a fresh start. - Paul Bernstein

The weight of the merger process and the expectations of the new organization rest on the shoulders of the leaders. Managing that pressure is no easy task.

Often when there was a difficult question or challenging moment during the merger, the answer was “let’s have the incoming CEO decide.” So by the time I was brought on, I could feel the amount of complicated and potentially contentious decisions that needed to be addressed. The first few months were an avalanche of operational, strategic, financial, and people decisions, which inevitably involved managing loss that many felt around colleagues, programs, and cultures they had built over many years. Strategically, I was determined that we wouldn’t fall victim to being a part of an “endless merger.” I was intent on creating one new unified organization. Our first strategic plan, for example, was very clearly a Prizmah strategic plan. Today we still have a number of professional team members who came from the preceding legacy organizations. An outsider would not be able to tell who or which programs came from which organization. That’s a point of pride for me. - Paul Bernstein

We all experienced these relatively small mergers in the confines of the Jewish nonprofit sector. But that in and of itself poses real challenges. Small mergers of this kind are challenging. Everybody knows everybody; everybody cares. I use the analogy that it’s like working at a family-owned kosher restaurant. Anyone can walk into the kitchen and say “it’s too salty” and tell the chef they know how to cook. That dynamic was a part of this experience, and we as leaders learn to manage that in real-time. - Aaron Katler

Once you get past things like mission alignment and value propositions, it’s about other details and factors to drive the process forward. We brought in an outside consultant to help make the big decisions to go in new directions, which needed to be done. We were dealing with people’s livelihoods at times, which is especially challenging since we also strive to be a model for the field. - Gali Cooks