Our mission is to inform and educate the American Jewish community about Jewish service in the United States Armed Forces. Although we are not military recruiters, we do believe that young Jewish Americans should consider serving in the military. We want to ensure that the American Jewish community knows enough about the Armed Forces to allow its young people to include the military as an option, whether as a way to pay for an undergraduate, graduate or professional education; as a meaningful and useful prelude to a civilian career; or as a career path.
The five members of AJMSI formed our consortium because we are concerned about the significant decrease over the last several decades in the number of Jewish Americans who choose to serve our country in uniform. In World War II, over 550,000 American Jews served in the military--somewhere around four percent of the total force, a proportion roughly equal to, if not slightly greater than, the percentage of Jews in America. Today, in contrast, that number is about 15,000--less than one percent of the military. We see the decline in Jewish military service as problematic for the American Jewish community, the Armed Forces, and the country as a whole.
