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American synagogues are being forced into a terrible choice: Collaborate with ICE or risk our own safety
(JTA) — The occupation of Minneapolis by ICE is terrifying and ominous. Last month 1,000 clergy from around the country traveled to the Twin Cities to witness how armed agents daily sweep through neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, abducting people, tear gassing witnesses, and threatening everyone’s safety. Houses of worship have gone into lockdown, transforming their sanctuaries into private spaces, putting a locked door between them and their neighbors.
As rabbis, one question has become urgent and immediate: What will we do when ICE comes to our door?
For hundreds of synagogues across the United States, that question may well already have been answered. They just don’t know it yet.
This year, as in years past, hundreds of synagogues across the country are set to receive grants through the Nonprofit Security Grants Program, a Department of Homeland Security initiative administered by FEMA. The program offers between $60,000 and $100,000 (sometimes more) in security funding to houses of worship and other nonprofits. The money goes toward security cameras, armed guards, and physical enhancements and more. For many synagogues facing antisemitic threats and stretched budgets, that’s a transformative amount of money that would be hard to turn down.
Many progressive communities like ours have long believed that depending on DHS to keep us safe is a problem, owing to the department’s surveillance of Muslims and the fact that the grants strengthen infrastructure that puts some community members at risk. But in 2025 the mismatch between Jewish communal values and practices and resources to ensure our safety became even more stark when the Trump administration slipped new language into the terms of the grant. The money now appears to come with strings that should alarm any Jewish community.
The grant now requires participating organizations to cooperate with ICE operations, forbids participating organizations from engaging in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming, and bars participation in any kind of “discriminatory prohibited boycott” (an apparent reference to boycotts of Israel). To access the Nonprofit Security Grants, synagogues all over the country have agreed to become extensions of the apparatus now raiding American cities.
It’s not yet clear how many synagogues have applied for the grants with these terms or have gotten them. It’s also not clear whether many synagogues are even fully aware of what they’ve signed on to. Especially before Minneapolis, “cooperation with immigration enforcement” may have seemed like an abstraction or even acceptable to many communities, and perhaps they didn’t really expect their diversity programming to be audited. Think of it as the Terms of Service problem. How many of us actually read what we’re agreeing to when we click “accept” on Apple’s terms? We know there’s something in there we probably wouldn’t like, but we need the phone.
It’s possible many synagogues did the same calculation with DHS money. They assumed the restrictions wouldn’t really matter, whereas tens of thousand dollars in security money was a concrete and pressing need. Never mind the fact that for years Muslim organizations have been sounding this alarm.
Last August, my congregation in Philadelphia, Kol Tzedek, joined with dozens of synagogues and Jewish organizations along with over 100 communal leaders to refuse this funding, and we tried to sound the alarm. We signed a letter explaining why we couldn’t in good conscience trade security dollars for collaboration with an agency whose mission conflicts with our values. But many other synagogues applied to take the money anyway. They need the cameras. They need to keep their members safe. What choice did they have?
It didn’t help that the umbrella organization for Jewish federations urged synagogues to apply, assuring them that it believed the terms would not be applied to them and noting that they could always turn down the funds once offered.
But now the federations group is sounding the alarm about a continued lack of clarity around the terms, and those congregations are in a terrible situation, one they may not even realize they’re in.
Houses of worship are some of the most powerful sites of resistance to ICE operations precisely because we can provide sanctuary. For centuries, religious communities have stood between state violence and vulnerable people. DHS understood this threat to its mission, and that’s exactly why they attached these strings to their security money.
It’s a clever and effective scheme: The Trump administration leveraged our real security fears to neutralize an institution that historically has had the moral and legal standing to say no to state violence and provide actual sanctuary to refugees and immigrants.
If your synagogue, nonprofit or community center received a grant from the $270 million federal budget for this program (and statistically, it probably did) you need to know what you’re on the hook for. More importantly, you need to know you have a choice about what comes next.
When ICE comes to your city and demands your cooperation the only moral choice is noncompliance. Thirty-six times the Torah instructs us to protect the ger – Hebrew for the sojourner, the immigrant, the most vulnerable in our midst. So when the time comes, refuse to cooperate, even if you signed that agreement and risk losing tens of thousands from your budget.
But it’s not too late. There are things you can and should do now. Find out if your congregation or organization sought or took this money. Ask for transparency about where your community stands. Tell your leadership that you didn’t sign up for this, that collaboration with ICE operations is not compatible with your community’s values, that there are opportunities for community safety that don’t require collaboration with the apparatus being used to terrorize and punish American cities.
To my fellow rabbis, synagogue executive directors and board presidents, I truly understand the impossible calculations you have to make and why the money seems irresistible. But this is the moment to make a different choice, even if it’s costly.
Consider the alternative: What happens when ICE shows up in your town and at your door, and your contract obligates you to cooperate? What happens when your own congregant is targeted? Or when a congregant learns their synagogue helped enable a raid on their neighbor’s family, their school, a place of worship? What happens when history looks back at this moment and asks what we did?
Jewish federations, and specifically the Secure Community Network, bear a lot of responsibility here. They put us in this position by lobbying for this fund’s creation and tying themselves to DHS. They facilitated these agreements, distributed this money, made it seem normal and necessary. They could have made a different choice: They represent billions of dollars in assets that could have chosen a different security model for our communities, and they still can.
The federations should bail out congregations that choose noncompliance by creating a fund for synagogues that refuse or break their DHS contracts. They should work to build the security infrastructure we actually need, one that protects us and our neighbors.
This moment is a test of our values. The question isn’t whether you took the money last year (many did, for reasons that made sense at the time). The question is, knowing what you’re on the hook for, and knowing after Minneapolis what ICE is about, what will you do now? Will you comply when ICE comes knocking? Will you check their paperwork, provide access, facilitate raids?
Or will you remember why houses of worship exist in the first place? We are here to be places where the vulnerable find protection, where we are accountable to each other, where we answer to something higher than federal enforcement agencies.
Sanctuary means something, or it means nothing. This is the moment to decide which it will be.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
STERLING, ILLINOIS — On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.
Around 75 people gathered on the edge of the field this week in Sterling, Illinois, a two-hour drive west of Chicago, where Jakobs and his family broke ground on a new home for Temple Sholom, the small congregation that has anchored Jewish life here for more than a century, and where his family has prayed since the 1950s.
The planned 4,000-square-foot building will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years. Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”
A 60-foot blue ribbon — chosen by Jakobs’ wife, Katie, to match the color of the Israeli flag — stretched across the future building site. His four daughters held it alongside his parents, brothers and friends. Then Jakobs lifted oversized gold scissors and cut the ribbon as pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches applauded.
I’m writing a book about a young Jewish farmer who is building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois using sacred objects (ark, Torah, stained glass windows) donated by closing congregations across America. Today, they held the groundbreaking. 🧑🌾 🌽🕍 pic.twitter.com/90TynBMWHC
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) May 8, 2026
The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past.
A nearby storage area holds Jewish objects Jakobs rescued from shuttered synagogues across the country: stained-glass windows, Torah arks, rabbi’s chairs, memorial plaques and wooden tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel. Many came from Temple B’nai Israel, a 113-year-old synagogue that closed down in 2025. It served generations of Jews in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, now a ghost town since the steel mills closed. Its remaining congregants donated sacred objects to Jakobs so their story could live on rather than disappear.
The day before the groundbreaking, the Jakobs family began opening some of the crates for the first time since they were packed away nearly a year ago. Nik’s father, Dave Jakobs, pried open one box with a hammer and crowbar while Nik loosened screws with an electric drill, the family gathered around like archaeologists opening a tomb.
Inside was a stained-glass window with images of a tallit and shofar bursting in jewel tones of blue, yellow and red. Jakobs’ mother, Margo, lifted Annie, the youngest of Nik’s daughters, so the 4-year-old could peer inside. The bright red glass matched the bow in her hair.
Nearby sat the massive wooden ark salvaged from Pennsylvania, topped with twin Lions of Judah whose carved paws once overlooked generations of worshippers.
Faith on the farmland
Temple Sholom — founded in 1910 — was once the center of Jewish life in Sterling, a town of 14,500 surrounded by flat farmland and tall grain silos. Its Jewish community once included a pharmacist, the manager of Kline’s department store and the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise.
Over time, membership dwindled. The roof sagged. The pews emptied.
Last year, the congregation sold its aging building and relocated High Holiday services to a tent on the Jakobs’ farm, where prayers mingled with the smell of manure and cattle lowing nearby.
At a moment when many small-town synagogues are closing, Temple Sholom is doing something increasingly rare: building a bigger new sanctuary from scratch. The synagogue will sit prominently along one of Sterling’s main roads — a highly visible expression of Jewish life in a region where Jews are few.
Thursday’s groundbreaking took place on the National Day of Prayer, the annual observance formalized under President Ronald Reagan, who grew up a few miles away in Dixon, Illinois. Earlier that morning, attendees gathered inside New Life Lutheran Church for a breakfast sponsored by Temple Sholom.
“I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”
Inside the church sanctuary, a large wooden cross glowed amber and blue above the dais while two giant screens displayed the National Day of Prayer logo. Jakobs, wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a powder-blue blazer, addressed the crowd.
“Tolerance is not weakness,” he said. “It is strength.”
The new synagogue will sit beside New Life Lutheran Church on land sold to Temple Sholom by farmer Dan Koster, 71, who has known the Jakobs family for three generations.
“We need more religious presence in the community,” Koster said.
For Drew Williams, New Life’s 38-year-old lead pastor, the synagogue and museum represent more than neighboring buildings. His church already hosts food-packing drives, summer meal programs and community events. He imagines future partnerships with Temple Sholom.
“I don’t think there’s any community that is immune to hate,” Williams said. “That just means it’s on us” to be on the other side “spreading peace.”
Sterling Mayor Diana Merdian, who is 41 and grew up in town with Jakobs, said the project reflects a broader desire among younger generations to preserve local history and identity. “If we don’t carry those stories, we lose them,” she said. “Once you lose that, you can’t get it back.”
During the ceremony in the cornfield, Temple Sholom’s longtime cantor, Lori Schwaber, asked those gathered to remember the congregation’s founding members and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish together. Jews and Christians stood side by side in the prairie wind as Hebrew prayers drifted across the open farmland.
Lester Weinstine, a 90-year-old congregant who was the first bar mitzvah at Temple Sholom when the shul was still housed out of a Pepsi bottling plant, looked out across the field in disbelief. “I never thought I would see this,” he said.
For Jakobs, the synagogue project has become inseparable from the lessons his grandparents’ survival taught him. “You sometimes feel on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But this community — that’s not what I’ve experienced here.”
If construction stays on schedule, the synagogue will open in fall 2027. Its first major service will not be a dedication ceremony, but the bat mitzvah of Jakobs’ oldest daughter, Taylor.
Members of the Pennsylvania congregation are planning a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion, after donating many of their sacred objects to help build Jakob’s synagogue. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.
“If a farmer can build a synagogue in a cornfield,” Jakobs said, “anybody can do it anywhere.”
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Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique?
AppleTV+’s new thriller Unconditional has the trappings of so much streaming content.
A young woman disappears into hostile territory. Her mother, already juggling a family health crisis, does her own sleuthing to get her daughter back. People die, twisty alliances emerge. It’s all part of the suspense boiler plate, and it sizzles just enough to keep your interest. What makes the show, airing May 8, different from every other show is the early response.
Sight almost entirely unseen, the internet was in an uproar. The show is Israeli, and the announcement trailer showed the character Gali (Ronn Talia Lynne) in her IDF uniform. Pro-Palestine accounts were quick to shout “hasbara” or “overt ziopropaganda” for a show whose premise is ostensibly a sympathetic story of an Israeli taken prisoner by the evil, Putin-era Russian state. (The trailer makes no mention of Palestinians or a war in Gaza. The show doesn’t either.)
The online response alone proves the challenging optics for anything Israeli, but the show actually has quite a bit to say about the Jewish state’s propaganda apparatus — within the country and without.
On a layover in the Moscow Airport, Gali and her mother, Orna (Liraz Chamami), are taken in for questioning. Security claims to have found drugs in Gali’s backpack — an echo of the Naama Issacher affair from 2019 — and she’s summarily sentenced to seven years in a Russian jail.
Orna returns to Israel and hires a PR handler to plead Gali’s case. Together they curate a specific image to sell to the state media.
Gali is a “happy, good-hearted girl. She served in the army, like everyone” and even extended her service, Orna says in radio and television interviews. The file photo for news segments is exactly what so many outside of Israel would object to: Gali in uniform. In Israel it tugs heart strings. Abroad, it makes the abductee a war criminal who had it coming.
It’s probably not giving much away, given that the hands behind this show are the creators of Hatufim, which became a hit in the U.S. as the antihero-forward War on Terror commentary Homeland, that Gali is not a perfect victim. This is a strange sort of hasbara, if one Israel often produces, the kind that’s peopled by problematic characters operating in the society’s gray zones. (See streaming hit Fauda, following a morally-dubious undercover unit made up of trigger-happy adulterers exploiting their Palestinian contacts.)
What’s surprising, given the premise, is how much time the show spends not in Russia or Israel, but in India, where Gali and Orna were touring before their fateful missed connection in Moscow. It’s here we’re given entree into the Ugly Israeli abroad, a stereotype that is growing increasingly common thanks to reports of poor behavior — stealing money from temples, creating chaos in hospitals and restaurants — in the global East. (On the flip side, many Israelis, like a couple at a noodle shop in Vietnam, are being harassed by other tourists for no reason other than their country of origin and some feel the need to hide their identity while traveling.)
Gali sings the praises of an Indian gastropub that will give you dysentery. “We are so lucky because for the last three months the kitchen has been condemned by the health department,” she smirks. “But yesterday some truck driver hit a wild boar, so they gave them an exemption. So it won’t be a waste.”
In a later episode, one of Gali’s companions wisecrack about the pestilential heat and jibe that prisons in India are particularly atrocious. (This must ring alarm bells for those aware of Israel’s carceral system for Palestinians.)
Russia is equally backward. Unlike in Israel, “not everyone here is happy to work with a woman,” a Russian arms dealer weighs in. If you didn’t get it, these countries are backward. Israel has its problems, but at least it has women in power!
Watching, I was reminded of social media posts by Indians complaining about racism and drug use from IDF veterans on the so-called “Hummus trail.” One post by AJ+ said the soldiers come there to “detox” from “carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”
Unconditional is under no illusions that Israelis can be a disruptive presence. If anything, it pushes the concept to new places. These Sabras ruin mindfulness workshops and start shoot-outs in hotel lobbies. It’s not great for the brand.
But then again, we live in a climate where simply acknowledging the existence of Israelis — as seen in a recent ballyhoo surrounding author R.F. Kuang — can prove controversial or politically-loaded, no matter how neutral the depiction.
Why Apple would give their imprimatur to an Israeli project today, when public opinion of the Jewish state has fallen off a demographic cliff, is a valid question likely explained by the positive reception of another Israeli import on the streamer, the show Tehran, about an IDF hacker stuck in Iran. From within the silos it’s hard to tell if audiences will cancel their subscriptions, as some have threatened.
Maybe, like Gali’s uniform, the show is a Rorschach. BDS types may boycott, yet the show seems to echo many of their talking points about Israel’s overzealous campaign in Gaza after Oct. 7 — at least by way of metaphor.
In a late episode, Orna tells her government companion Rita (Evgenia Dodina) about a time a classmate broke Gali’s arm, and the teacher excused his actions because his mother was in the hospital.
“You’re exactly like the teacher,” Rita tells Orna. “You give me a thousand excuses for Gali. ‘It’s because of me. It’s not her fault. Poor thing.’ It doesn’t matter she didn’t understand what she was getting into, and it doesn’t matter she didn’t mean to.”
Orna says it’s different with Gali — because it’s her daughter. One can overlook a lot when it’s your family, or, for that matter, your country.
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Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City
(JTA) — An Israeli man was indicted on Thursday in connection to the violent assault of a Catholic nun in Jerusalem last month, after prosecutors said he targeted her over her Christian identity.
Yona Schreiber, 36, from the West Bank settlement of Peduel, was arrested last week and has since been indicted on charges of “assault causing actual injury motivated by hostility toward the public on the grounds of religion, as well as simple assault,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement.
According to the indictment, Schreiber, who is Jewish, attacked the nun just outside of the Old City in Jerusalem because he identified her as a Catholic nun. Schreiber allegedly pushed and then kicked the nun as she was lying on the ground and also attacked a passerby who attempted to intervene.
תקיפת הנזירה אתמול באזור קבר דוד בירושלים – שוטרי מרחב דוד איתרו את החשוד (36) ועצרו אותו בחשד לתקיפה ממניע גזעני >>> pic.twitter.com/agRpznR84X
— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) April 30, 2026
The nun, a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research, suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the state attorney’s office said.
The attack, which drew condemnation from Catholic leaders as well as faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, comes amid mounting concern over hostility toward Christian clergy and holy sites in Israel.
Cases of Jews harassing Christians have risen sharply in recent years. Last month, the IDF punished a soldier who was filmed bludgeoning a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. This week, the IDF also announced that it would discipline a different soldier who was seen placing a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary in a photo posted on social media.
Israel’s attorney general asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, where the indictment was filed, to hold Schreiber in detention for the duration of the legal proceeding.
The assault carries a maximum prison sentence of three years, which could increase to six years if prosecutors prove the attack was motivated by religious bias.
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