Another High Holiday season is here, and with it, lots and lots of Jews flocking to synagogues to attend services. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the High Holidays — and really, any gathering of Jews — has brought increased concerns of safety and security.
In Pennsylvania, an arsonist set fire to the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, last Passover. Philadelphia’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History has been the target of vandalism, and there have been numerous issues with antisemitism in area school districts.
This year, concerns in the Jewish community are still present, and perhaps more heightened than ever. Organizations like Secure Community Network — a company contracted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia — are tasked with handling it, said SCN’s community security director for the Federation Scott Kerns.
“Every year is obviously a little bit different based on what’s happening and how many incidents we’re tracking with regard to antisemitism,” Kerns said. “We work with the synagogue administrators and synagogue directors on everything from doing the training to working on physical assessments where we tell them, ‘Here’s the things that you need to upgrade or correct.’ We also help institutions apply for both federal and state grants.”
Secure Community Network has nearly completed eight separate week-long training sessions that started in August and end right before the High Holidays, meant to address a breadth of topics related to safety and security. In the past two weeks, it has done 25 total training sessions, with 21 of those being at Jewish preschools.
And it isn’t just private organizations that are heightening their activity this time of year. The Lower Merion Police Department is well aware of the risk, too, said Superintendent of Police Andy Block.
“With the holidays coming up, we’re working in partnership with the Federation and the Secure Community Network to basically make sure that we’ve taken the security to another level,” he said. “What we say on the law enforcement side of it is, we want to ‘harden the target,’ to make sure that there are no attempts of any type of domestic terrorism or any other type of incidents to our institutions within the township.”
Block said that the world today requires more concern than there is usually, even though synagogues, churches and mosques are always kept under a watchful eye.
“We take this very seriously, and we have additional officers that are deployed to the temples and to the synagogues. We work seamlessly with those institutions and their security forces, as well,” he said.
Kerns said there are many of these institutions who have young children to protect and this adds a wrinkle to the plans. Most organizations employ a strategy called “run, hide and fight,” in case of emergency, but that isn’t exactly plausible with preschoolers.
“That is the national standard. But when you have a bunch of two-year-olds, they may not be able to exit the building in the case of an active threat. So we actually go into the classrooms and show teachers where they should put their kids, as well as how to properly lock down their classrooms and things that they should be thinking,” Kerns said. “If there are panic buttons, hit those to call for help as quickly as possible, so that officers understand that there is a significant threat.”
Secure Community Network doesn’t just look to prepare for potential incidents. It catalogues the ones that unfortunately come to fruition. Kerns said that one of the biggest changes that the organization has seen in the years it has been working with the Federation is a spike in antisemitism.
He said that as soon as the organization created a form to catalogue this, they saw an uptick in incidents, which Kerns said indicates that many were previously going unreported.
“And then, unfortunately, after Oct. 7, as you can well imagine, numbers went through the roof,” he said.
Block said that the department places officers in uniform at synagogues and schools, but also has other personnel in the area that are not as obvious to potential threats. He said, unequivocally, stopping antisemitism from impacting the community must be a communitywide effort.
“We have no room for antisemitism, and we take those complaints very seriously, investigate them, and work collectively — it’s a partner approach to this — to make sure that our residents and people that are going to temples and the synagogues are safe,” he said. “There’s that hypervigilance that’s going on right now with everything that’s occurring, so we take that very seriously, and we will investigate those complaints. If we can locate who is perpetrating those incidents, we will move forward with criminal charges.”
