In recent years, synagogues across the country have increased funding for security measures, as Howard Husock explains, to “prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel” in Texas earlier this year. Congregations must make difficult decision about such measures: safety enhancements can make synagogues seem less welcoming, and each dollar spent on security detracts from educational programming, renovations, and so forth. Husock sketches these and other pressures facing American synagogues:
Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or Sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. . . . Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.
We Jews are hardly the only religious people at risk. There have been numerous shootings at religious sites in recent years, most notably at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina (nine dead), the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 dead), and the Sikh temple of Oak Creek, Wisconsin (six dead). About 80 percent of Protestant pastors say they have some security measures in place, according to a 2019 Lifeway Research survey.
Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago.
Read more on Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-synagogues-anti-semitism-tax-hate-crime-shooter-shooting-attack-bigotry-judaism-security-11652992632