On May 15, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a complaint against a 32-year-old commander of Kataib Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Iraqi militia, who they say sent an undercover officer a photograph and a map pinpointing a prominent New York synagogue, texted over a document describing its congregants as supporters of Israel’s right to exist, and then paid $3,000 in cryptocurrency to set the bombing in motion. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the plot was aimed at “the heart of our Jewish community.” That is the threat that a coalition of nearly every major faith in America is now asking Congress to help them buy locks, cameras and blast film against.
Led by the American Jewish Committee, a group of Jewish and interfaith organizations has written to congressional leaders urging an expansion of the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program to “up to $1 billion,” according to a report by Jewish Insider. The letter describes “an unprecedented and escalating threat environment facing religious communities and institutions across the United States” and argues the threat “is not abstract; it is very real and felt by the communities we represent on a daily basis.”
The grant program is a Department of Homeland Security pot of money, run since 2005, that pays nonprofits and houses of worship at high risk of attack for the unglamorous stuff: reinforced doors, shatter-resistant glass, blast film on the windows, cameras, alarms, fencing, panic buttons and active-shooter training, per FEMA’s description of the program and its eligible uses.
The coalition’s letter says “previous funding has not kept pace with demand,” and the numbers back that up. In 2024, the program drew 7,584 applications requesting roughly $973 million, and DHS could fund only $454.5 million of it, about 43 percent of the requests, with Jewish institutions making up 37 percent of the recipients, according to a tally of the 2024 grant cycle. So more than half of the synagogues, mosques, churches and community centers that did the paperwork and named their fear got told no. The request now on the table, “up to $1 billion,” is roughly what every applicant asked for in a single year, finally met.
That $1 billion ask is not a one-off plea from advocates. In March, 150 members of the House, led by Representatives Gabe Amo, a Rhode Island Democrat, and Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, signed their own letter pushing the same figure for fiscal year 2027, Jewish Insider reported. “This is a response that’s proportional to the demand, and right now, we need to act swiftly,” Amo said. The goalposts have moved fast: the program ran on $274.5 million in 2025, a proposed $300 million in 2026, and a year earlier lawmakers were asking for only $500 million.
The coalition wrote that faith-based institutions “should be able to solely focus on serving and strengthening their communities, but in this heightened threat environment, they instead must also worry about the next attack and whether they have the resources to stay safe,” and that members of targeted communities are forced to “weigh the risk of violence against the act of worship.” Nationally, the Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2024, the highest in the 46 years it has tracked them, including 196 assaults and 2,606 acts of vandalism, per its 2024 audit.
New York is where those numbers concentrate. The ADL recorded 976 antisemitic incidents in New York City in 2024, more than any other city in the country, with 157 of them targeting synagogues and Jewish institutions directly, according to its review of NYC incidents. And the NYPD’s own 2025 tally found that of 576 hate crimes recorded across the five boroughs, 330 were antisemitic, about 57 percent, even though Jewish New Yorkers are roughly 10 percent of the city’s population, reported by The Jewish Chronicle. “Antisemitism continues to be the most persistent hate threat that we face,” Commissioner Tisch said.
The letter also calls for passage of the Pray Safe Act, a bipartisan federal bill that would establish a centralized clearinghouse inside DHS to give houses of worship one place to find security guidance, training and information about which grants they actually qualify for. In practice, congregations now navigate the grant maze alone, which is part of why so many applications miss. The clearinghouse is the bill’s attempt to fix that.
City Hall has been moving on a parallel track. In May, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a roughly $26 million expansion of the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, a near nine-fold jump from its previous budget, the Forward reported. “Too often, the only response offered to a hate crime is exactly that, it’s a response,” Mamdani said. “Today we want to also do the work of preventing those hate crimes.”
Nine Jewish organizations signed the federal letter alongside the American Jewish Committee: the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Hillel International, the JCC Association of North America, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Orthodox Union, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. They were joined by organizations representing Muslim, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, Hindu, Evangelical, Seventh-day Adventist, Sikh, and Catholic communities. The door that needs locking belongs to all of them.
The $1 billion fight is in Washington and will not resolve before the next budget cycle, but there is money you can actually reach right now. If you run or attend a Brooklyn synagogue, mosque, church, community center or cultural nonprofit, New York State’s Securing Communities Against Hate Crimes program has up to $70 million open, with grants as large as $250,000 for security cameras, lighting, locks, training and cybersecurity. The application deadline is noon on July 8, and you can apply through the Division of Criminal Justice Services at the state’s grant announcement. The federal coalition is asking Congress to stop telling half of them no. Until that lands, the state’s deadline is the one on the calendar.
Featured image: Jim Henderson / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
