In the aftermath of the hostage situation at a synagogue in Texas, every Jewish institution in America, no matter the size, is once again reckoning with the overwhelming financial, material and spiritual costs of keeping our communities safe in a country where weapons of mass murder are available off the shelf at Walmart. I’m a…
Securing Jewish institutions has rarely been this complicated: There’s the question of reopening, a spike in anti-Semitic activity online — which security experts worry could translate to physical attacks — and the pressing national conversation about racism in policing, and the Jewish community’s relationship to police. The Secure Community Network is the Jewish organization at…
The High Holidays are here. Synagogues will swell with their biggest crowds of the year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But in the wake of the Pittsburgh and Poway shootings in the past year, and amid a nation-wide uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, American Jewish communities are on edge. What role can you, as a…
As the High Holidays near, some religious Jews are considering an unusual question: Are swords like jewelry? In the time of the Talmud, one stream of rabbinic thought considered swords to be an adornment — and thus permissible to carry in a synagogue on the Sabbath and holidays. After a year in which a dozen…
The wake-up call for the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue came the morning 11 Jews at prayer were killed in Pittsburgh. The Reform congregation created a security committee and quickly began planning and implementing changes. Because they did not have a deep rainy-day fund to draw on, they cut the facilities budget, and added a $190 security…
Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law, was the official whose security clearance was denied last year, The Washington Post reported. He was listed as “Senior White House Official 1” in recently released documents, according to people with insight on the matter. Tricia Newbold, of the White House’s personnel security office, gave…
Entering Jerusalem from the Shomron area in the West Bank this morning, my navigation system took me on a new path that I had never driven down before. Although new to me, this road has been getting a lot of media attention, dubbed by some as “the Apartheid road” because it runs side by side…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Thousands of potential visitors to Israel were turned away in 2018 when they reached the country. Of the about 4 million visitors to Israel in 2018, nearly 19,000 were turned away by immigration staff when they reached an entry point over concerns that they would commit criminal or security crimes in the…
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