Jewish Groups Get $25M In Security Funds — Despite Talk Of Cuts
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Jewish groups welcomed $25 million in federal security grants for nonprofits, thanking Congress and the Trump administration for funding in line with previous years’ grants.
The Department of Homeland Security disbursed the funding last week, the vast majority of which goes to Jewish institutions. The money is congressionally mandated, but the Trump administration has attempted to roll back funding in other areas despite such mandates.
“These grants are essential to providing protection for our children as they go off to school every day, adults as they pray in our congregations and makes people in American communities across the country more secure on a day-to-day basis,” said Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union, which has lobbied for the grants along with Agudath Israel of America and the Jewish Federations of North America.
The $25 million figure is consistent with funding in recent years; Congress had reduced the funding in the late 2000s during the recession.
“Homegrown violent extremists and international terrorist organizations continue to pose a threat of lethal violence,” said William Daroff, JFNA’s director, in a statement sent Thursday to JTA. “This existential threat bears out in the now regular and rising overt expressions of anti-Semitism across the country in the forms of graffiti, hate speech and other symbolic expressions, vandalism, assaults, and bomb threats.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
