Built from the community, for the community

Merkaz was founded by people who ran synagogue operations and community organizations themselves — and who grew tired of forcing Jewish communal life into software designed for gyms and sales teams. Hebrew calendars treated as errors. Event registrations that landed on Shabbat because the tool had never heard of it. Member records with no place for a yahrtzeit date that matters for decades. Merkaz exists so that the software finally understands the calendar it serves.

What the platform includes

Merkaz unifies the tools a congregation usually runs across four vendors:

• Member CRM: households, life-cycle events, affiliations, and giving history in one record — designed for multi-generational community relationships, not just mailing lists.
• Jewish-calendar-native features: Hebrew date support, yahrtzeit and kaddish reminders, and holiday-aware communications are first-class features, not bolt-ons.
• Shabbat-aware scheduling: the platform simply will not propose event times that conflict with Shabbat and festivals, and it handles ZIP-code-level candle-lighting times properly.
• Communications and events: newsletters, event registration, and volunteer coordination replacing the duct-taped email and spreadsheet stack.

How we serve our users

Support staff answer in plain language for administrators who did not sign up to be technologists, and migration from legacy systems is handled for you. Pricing is scaled to community size — a small congregation should not pay enterprise rates to remember yahrtzeits.

Merkaz — the Hebrew word for center — is built to be exactly that: one reliable place where the operational side of Jewish communal life runs with dignity, on the right calendar, every week of the year.