United Jewish Communities has renamed itself the Jewish Federations of North America and adopted a new logo it hopes will be used by its more than 500 member charities to strengthen the parent group’s public profile, The New York Times reports.

Federation affiliates donate more than $3-billion a year to Jewish causes, but all have different names and brand identities, creating what the group’s former chairman, James Tisch, called “the alphabet soup of Jewish philanthropy.”

The decline in American Jewish philanthropy wrought by the recession and the Bernard Madoff investment scandal could have a significant impact on social services in Israel, reports The Jerusalem Post, citing research to be presented at a forthcoming conference in Jerusalem.

The average gift to Jewish federations is down 4.3 percent, and many grant makers are reducing grants to Israeli organizations “as much or more than they are cutting locally,” according to the report by Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Center for the Study of Philanthropy in Israel.

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