Since he returned from a birthright Israel trip four years ago, Adam Broidy, a 27-year-old management consultant, has considered switching gears and pursuing a career in Jewish communal service.

“What I do now – it’s fine, but it’s not something that fulfills me,” said Broidy, who studied computer science at New York University.

Broidy imagines that working for a Jewish organization – perhaps one dedicated to promoting interdenominational pluralism or advocating on Israel’s behalf – would infuse his career with unrivaled meaning and purpose.

But he also weighs what he considers the less savory components of Jewish communal life: meager salaries, bureaucratic wrangling, too few opportunities for advancement.

Understanding what might tip the scales, bringing young professionals like Broidy into the Jewish communal fold is the goal of “The Jewish Sector’s Workforce: Report of a Six-Community Study.”

Professional Leaders Project (www.jewishleaders.net), a group devoted to recruiting and retaining a new generation of Jewish community professionals, commissioned the wide-ranging study out of Brandeis University whose findings were recently released.

“Common sense tells us we have a crisis, that we don’t have enough outstanding people choosing to work in the Jewish community,” said Professional Leaders Project Executive Director Rhoda Weisman Uziel, who helped launch pilot recruiting and mentoring networks, among other resources, for those in their 20s and 30s considering careers in the Jewish sector.

The new study gauges how and why the 1,500-plus respondents – a geographically diverse, multigenerational cohort of rabbis, educators, agency executives, fundraisers and clerical workers employed at synagogues, day schools, federations and advocacy groups – pursue careers in the Jewish communal arena.

“The Jewish Sector’s Workforce,” ambitious in its breadth, showed that the larger the job’s Judaic component, the higher the level of employee satisfaction; fundraising jobs have the sector’s highest attrition rates; aside from widespread dissatisfaction with pay and benefits, most Jewish communal employees say they are “very satisfied” with their jobs; and the overwhelming majority – 88 percent to 99 percent in various job categories – say they are “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied.”

The study also showed that while women make up the majority of Jewish sector workers, men are more likely to hold higher paying executive-level positions at synagogues, schools and federations; and more than half of those employed in the Jewish sector worked in the Jewish community – often as camp counselors, religious school teachers or youth group advisers – during high school or college.

Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis and a co-author of the study, said many respondents said they were “willing to give up money and mobility to do meaningful work” in the Jewish community.

The study focused on six communities where the Jewish population ranged from more than 200,000 to fewer than 7,000. Researchers, hoping to elicit candid responses from their subjects, agreed not to identify the communities or the full names and job titles of respondents.

Researchers divided respondents into seven subgroups – Daves, Abes, Ettis, Jethros, Moes, Jonis and Mimis – based on how, why and in what capacity they decided to enter the Jewish sector workforce. For example, a “Dave,” an allusion to King David, decided during high school or college to become a Jewish communal professional and likely works as a pulpit rabbi, while a Queen Esther-inspired “Etti,” who might work as a Judaic studies teacher, “fell into Jewish sector work and got hooked,” and has come to see herself as a Jewish community professional.

Saxe said the diversity of the Jewish sector workforce posed the greatest challenge to researchers.

Professional Leaders Project was not looking to isolate the experiences of rabbis or of Hebrew teachers, but to cast a wider net that also includes school administrators, organization executives, youth group directors, federation receptionists, social studies teachers at community day schools and media relations specialists. The seven prototypes, Saxe said, makes the study more reader friendly.

Professional Leaders Project funders, including the Eugene and Marcia Applebaum Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, and philanthropists William Davidson and Robert Aronson, subsidized the report.

The study’s methodology and findings are likely to be grist for the conversation mill next month when scores of young professionals, working in and out of the Jewish sector, join prominent Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists for Professional Leaders Project’s Brooklyn-based ThinkTank2.

Professional Leaders Project convened its initial think tank, with young Jewish professionals, last summer in Los Angeles. Many participants there expressed a growing disconnect between Generation Y Jews and the organized Jewish community, which they described during open-mike sessions as archaic, inflexible and money-driven.

Broidy, who attended last year’s workshop and plans to attend ThinkTank2, suggests that federations and the like, serious about reaching out to Jews in their 20s and 30s, develop competitive summer internship programs for college students; participate, alongside financial services and consulting firms, in on-campus recruiting; and offer one-on-one mentoring programs to retain young professionals who have accepted entry-level positions in the Jewish sector.

“They have to try their best to offer competitive packages,” Broidy said of the Jewish communal world. “As much as possible, they need to come