(SeaPRwire) – By: Elena Rostova
The convergence this year is uncomfortable. Rosh Hashanah falls on the evening marking 25 years since the September 11 attacks. Jewish families will walk into synagogues past armed guards, bag checks, and secured doors to welcome the year 5787. That scene is now the norm. It barely registers anymore. But step back and the picture is startling. A religious community of roughly two percent of the American population now spends an estimated $1 billion a year just to keep its doors open. That is $2.8 million every single day, across more than 4,500 institutions, according to Jewish Federations of North America. Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Manhattan’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun puts it plainly. The churches on his block leave their doors wide open. His synagogue runs a double-door system, cameras, and a line of guards. He calls this burden a vicious tax, levied by the antisemites. He is right, and the policy question buried inside that number is one Washington still has not answered. Who pays for the freedom to worship when worship itself becomes a target? Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of Jewish Federations of North America, traces it all back to one morning in 2001. Before 9/11, synagogue security meant a police officer directing holiday traffic. Maybe a basic alarm. Nobody believed physical protection was necessary. That assumption died with the towers.
The factual record of the transformation is worth laying out cold. Six days after the attacks, Rosh Hashanah 2001 proceeded with guards that were still unusual. Out of that moment came the Secure Community Network, built to give Jewish institutions a unified channel to federal law enforcement. Today SCN operates a national intelligence apparatus. In 2025 alone it logged 4,400 incident reports, trained 40,000 people, and made 851 referrals to law enforcement. Its Duty Desk has recorded nearly 3,200 threat incidents this year, pacing ahead of last. The Community Security Service trained more than 20,000 people in 2025. Some 6,100 of its volunteers protected 440 synagogues and nearly 100 events, logging over 300,000 guard hours across 24 states. Federations now place professional security directors in all 141 of their communities. This is not a patchwork anymore. It is a parallel homeland security architecture, privately funded, built inside a civil society that never asked for one. The threat data justifies the builders. The FBI recorded 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in 2025, 63 percent of all religiously motivated incidents and 14 percent of every hate crime in the country. In New York City, major crime fell 6.2 percent in the first eight months of 2026 while confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 8 percent, to 229. Nearly one every 25 hours. The incidents are not abstract either. In March, an attacker inspired by Hezbollah drove a pickup loaded with gasoline and fireworks into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, rifle in hand, while 140 children sat inside the early childhood center. Every child escaped. In August, a man allegedly disrupted a Friday service of 375 people at Central Synagogue, assaulting a congregant and a guard. Steinmetz says threats exploded after October 7th, and the numbers back him.
Now follow the money, because that is where the policy failure lives. One full-time guard costs roughly $90,000 a year. Multiply that across thousands of congregations and the billion-dollar figure stops being surprising. It becomes structural. The community’s answer, the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, would strengthen federal security assistance for at-risk nonprofits. That is a sensible patch. But it treats security spending as an emergency appropriation rather than what it actually is, a permanent operating cost of religious life in America. Governments at every level have quietly outsourced the physical defense of a targeted minority to the minority itself. New Jersey coordinates with the FBI and state police. The NYPD plans holiday briefings. Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s department will detail its posture soon. All useful. None of it touches the daily invoice. The honest regulatory outcome here is stark. Either the state absorbs the cost of protecting constitutional worship, the way it absorbs the cost of protecting elections and courts, or the tax Steinmetz describes becomes a fixed feature of American pluralism. Detroit’s Steven Ingber says his community enters the holidays vigilant, prepared, and proud. Rabbi Aaron Starr speaks of heaviness and hope together. Admirable. But resilience is not a funding model. Congress should pass the security act with multi-year appropriations and stop making synagogues re-audition for their own safety every budget cycle. Anything less means the antisemites keep collecting.
Author bio: Elena Rostova, a public policy expert specializing in compliance assessments for governments and sovereign funds, with fifteen years analyzing security funding frameworks and nonprofit regulatory burdens across North America and Europe.