The murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky last week in Washington, DC rocked Jewish people across the country.
Milgrim and Lischinsky, staffers at the Israel embassy, were attending an American Jewish Committee event in honor of American Jewish Heritage Month at the Capital Jewish Museum.
As they left the event, they were gunned down by a pro-Palestinian, protester who traveled from Chicago with a firearm.
The alleged shooter, Elias Rodriguez, is in custody and being charged with first degree murder, among other charges.
The event was a constellation that American Jews commonly find themselves in — gathering with friends and like-minded people at a Jewish community event.
For close to a decade, Jewish institutions in the US have begun “hardening” their buildings, trying to make them more secure in the face of terrorism and anti-Semitism. The 2018 mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh massively expanded those efforts.
It has now become extremely unusual to see a synagogue or other Jewish institution without either a security officer stationed at front or a monitored entry system.
Many of those systems kicked into gear as news of the attack became known. Locally, the Secure Community Network Colorado team was in contact with its national desk and also with local law enforcement.
According to an SCN statement sent Thursday, May 22, local agencies “voluntarily offered to increase their presence around Jewish facilities with additional patrol presence.”
Extra police were spotted at Jewish institutions that day, including at the JCC.
The statement also said that “there have been no identified ties or specific, related threats in Colorado against any Jewish facility or individuals.”
SCN, which works with JEWISHcolorado to provide safety and security programs to the Jewish community. SCN’s programs are free of charge.
Last week, prior to the event in Washington, SCN had announced a new training available for the community, “Guardian Teams,” designed to assist in establishing and training facility safety teams. The training is comprised of three blocks: foundations, preparation and administration.
Kevin Farrington, SCN regional security advisor for Colorado, describes the three blocks thus:
• Foundations sets out the different roles and responsibilities of individuals on the security team, how to deploy those individuals, how to plan for an event or respond to an incident, and foundations for effective communication.
• Preparation teaches how to establish a standard operating procedure, train the team effectively, plan and conduct an exercise for the team and conduct effective after-actions follow up.
• Administration teaches how to select team members, equip the team, conduct effective scheduling and report incidents.
SCN continues to offer its existing trainings — situational awareness; countering active threat; power of hello; deescalation; camp safety training and campus safety training.
Farrington urges Jewish institutions to report any security concerns to SCN.
All of this security comes at a high cost. One of the main avenues for Jewish institutions has been the federal government’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
Rob Goldberg, who runs Goldberg & Associates, a consulting firm advising organizations seeking NSGP grants, helped write the program into law 20 years ago.
It’s a complicated process that involves federal and state agencies. The grants come in the form of reimbursements, after an organization has laid out the funds for their security upgrades.
Like many federal programs, NSGP, which operates out of FEMA, is being reviewed by the Trump administration to see if the “funds are being used as Congress intended,” in the words of Dept. Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem.
Goldberg believes that may be part of the reason that emergency supplemental funds for 2024 have not been released, even though both Congress and the president have signed off on the grants.
The 2025 grant monies have also not yet been released. Neither have its guidelines, which are necessary to craft a grant application.
In 2024, bonus points were included due to the Israel-Hamas war and the heightened security situation for Jewish organizations. No one, including Goldberg, knows whether 2025’s will include that same multiplier (“Is your institution at greater risk because of the Hamas war?”).
The baseline for all applications is a vulnerability assessment — which is what many organizations will be reexamining in light of the May 21 killings. Pointed questions are arising around the events of May 21: Why were there security breakdowns, especially, of all cities, in Washington, DC?
Having security measures in place is not enough; measures are only as good as how they are used, says Goldberg, offering general points of consideration:
For example, an organization might have cameras — are they monitored?
An organization might have hired security — are local law enforcement aware of the event and also roving the street?
An organization might have greeters — do the greeters maintain their stations throughout the event?
An organization might have done an initial training — is it offering repeat trainings?
Has the organization added security to its annual budget?
Goldberg points to the folly of focusing solely on funding. “The goal isn’t getting the money. The goal is [addressing] the vulnerabilities. The obsession should be with enhancing our security with whatever is available with the grant.”
While the fate of NSGP has remained relatively stable under the Trump administration, Goldberg does not predict the $1 billion funding that some, among them Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have called for, not least because he doesn’t believe FEMA would be capable of administering such a large budget.
Discussions of what went wrong on May 21 are underway. Not only was the perpetrator able to deploy a firearm in plain sight, he was then able to proceed inside the building, where he remained unrestrained until police arrived according.
With all of the increased awareness and training post-Pittsburgh, what happened in Washington is perplexing.
Perhaps it goes back to Goldberg’s key word: vulnerabilities. Awareness of them, and training to protect the institution and its people from them. That’s not necessarily easy, and it also doesn’t happen in one session.
“We need to be constantly training,” says Goldberg. “And we need to budget for it.”
Kevin Farrington, 872-227-1117, kfarrington@securecommunitynetwork.org
