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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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VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish
די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך האָט דער „ייִדישפּיל“־טעאַטער אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ פֿון אַ „יום־השואה“־אַקאַדעמיע וואָס די טרופּע האָט דורכגעפֿירט אין 2022. די טעמע פֿון דער פּראָגראַם איז געווען מאָמענטן פֿון ליבע בײַ ייִדן אין די געטאָס און קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן.
אינעם ווידעאָ לייענען די אַקטיאָרן פֿאָר זכרונות פֿון לעבן געבליבענע ווי אויך ייִדישע לידער אָנגעשריבן בשעת דעם חורבן. זיי באַשרײַבן ווי אַזוי געליבטע פּאָרלעך האָבן זיך געטראָפֿן בשתּיקה; רירנדיקע מאָמענטן פֿון געזעגענען זיך און ווי די לעבן געבליבענע האָבן זיך באַמיט מיט אַלע כּוחות צו געפֿינען די געליבטע נאָך דער באַפֿרײַונג.
דער ווידעאָ הייבט זיך אָן מיט אַ באַגריסונג פֿונעם תּל־אָבֿיבֿער בירגערמײַסטער, רון חולדאי, אויף העברעיִש, אָבער די פּראָגראַם גופֿא איז אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש.
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In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera.
Back in 2012, while on assignment as the Chicago Tribune’s longtime music critic, I received a phone call from my editor that would change my life.
Elie Wiesel had just accepted the newspaper’s annual Literary Prize. Would I be interested in interviewing him for the paper?
Would I?!
There was only one minor problem: I had never read a word Wiesel had written, not even his revered Holocaust memoir Night. Holocaust education was not required in the 1950s and ’60s when I was growing up – not even in Skokie, a nexus of Holocaust survivors where I lived with my family. As the son of two survivors, I considered Holocaust books, films and TV programs emotionally overwhelming and something to be avoided, if possible.
My avoidance ended abruptly in 2001, when my then 69-year-old mother began re-experiencing her unspoken Holocaust childhood in the form of delusions. This prompted me to unearth her hidden story and tell it in a Tribune article and a subsequent book and a documentary for PBS – all aptly titled Prisoner of Her Past.
I assumed that work was the reason the Tribune tapped this music critic to interview Wiesel.
After a few weeks of reading everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on, I flew to New York and found myself seated inches away from him in his Manhattan office. Within minutes, we were speaking with a degree of comfort and intimacy I had not anticipated.
Even more remarkable, after Wiesel and I held a public conversation before 2,500-plus people in Chicago’s Symphony Center — a longstanding feature of the Tribune’s Literary Prize proceedings — he suggested that we stay in touch.
That’s when I realized we had the beginnings of a book: two generations — a survivor and a son of survivors — trying to come to terms with what happened to our families and to our people. For the next four years, I visited Wiesel regularly in New York and Florida and spoke with him often on the phone. The utterly unexpected privilege of these conversations ended suddenly with his death July 2, 2016, at age 87.
In effect, Wiesel had spent the last four years of his life communing with me about the Holocaust and its apparently never-ending after-effects, my tape recorder rolling all the while. These proved to be his final thoughts on the subject, which I took as precious lessons on a fraught subject. For Wiesel had given me answers to questions I never had been able to ask my parents. To them, the Holocaust was a subject not to be discussed with me or my sister, presumably to spare us the burden of such tragedy.
Wiesel poignantly addressed what I needed and wanted to know: How does the second generation deal with feelings of guilt over our parents’ unrelieved sufferings? How do we live up to our parents’ expectations of us, without suppressing our own dreams? How do we even speak of this terrifying subject? How religious must we be? How politically active? How do we cope with the enormity of it all?
And more.
I packed the answers – and our reflections on them – into my 2019 book The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel, which is the basis of the new opera: The Dialogue of Memories, which premieres next month in Seattle.
Why an opera?
Though I was glad to have captured on paper my treasured experiences with Wiesel, I wanted to share the wealth — to let others see and feel and hear what it was like to be in the room with him. I wanted audiences to witness Wiesel explaining and illuminating my own past to me. And like Wiesel, I’ve always believed in the indescribable but unstoppable power of music to go where words alone cannot.
In 2024, the Seattle-based non-profit Music of Remembrance commissioned composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer to write Before It All Goes Dark, an opera based on my Mac’s Journey stories in the Tribune about a Vietnam vet who learns he’s heir to a priceless collection of art looted by the Nazis (I had identified and located him).
After that opera’s success, I suggested to Music of Remembrance founder Mina Miller that my years with Wiesel represented a story of profound enlightenment that could be powerful onstage. Miller wasted no time commissioning the eminent American opera composer Tom Cipullo to write the music, with libretto by me with Cipullo.
The opera features three characters: Wiesel (sung by baritone Daniel Belcher); my mother, Sonia Reich (mezzo-soprano Megan Marino); and me (tenor Dominic Armstrong). Past and present, memory and prophesy, delusion and reality intermingle in its words. And Cipullo’s music lifts those words into the realm of sublime drama as only opera can do.
I don’t know how I’ll feel watching singers portraying Wiesel, my mother and myself confronting demons that have haunted all three of us, and millions of others around the world.
But as we mark Yom HaShoah, I do know that moments once shared by Wiesel and me alone now will be available to everyone. I hope that Wiesel’s brilliant insights and my mother’s tragic experiences will help others who — like me — have long struggled with dark and enduring histories.
The Dialogue of Memories plays May 17 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle; May 20 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco; and May 23-24 at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. For details and tickets visit www.musicofremembrance.org. Howard Reich can be reached at howard@howardreich.com.
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J Street says Israel should fund its own defense
J Street, the progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace political advocacy, is shifting its stance on defensive U.S. military aid to Israel as a growing number of Democrats, including some of the congressional candidates it endorsed this year, call for ending such assistance.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the organization’s longtime president, said in a lengthy post on Monday that the organization is now advocating for phasing out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel when the current $38 billion 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries expires in 2028. He called it “a fundamental reassessment of the U.S.-Israel security relationship,” citing “the war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran.”
Also stressing that “the US-Israel security relationship remains a central pillar of American policy in the Middle East,” Ben-Ami added that joint research and technological investment “should continue” and that the U.S. should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel. However, “all future Research and Development agreements with Israel must include genuine cost-sharing and aim to produce defense items that both countries plan to field.”
Ben-Ami’s post includes this statement, in boldface: “The goal of this reassessment is to advance the broader American interest of a more stable and prosperous Middle East that includes both Israelis and Palestinians living in security and freedom.”
U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011. J Street’s acceptance of the position for candidates appears aimed at navigating divisions among congressional Democrats as Democratic Party voter views swing against Israel and influential progressive figures in the congressional delegation, most conspicuously Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who previously backed missile-defense funding, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, join calls to end all military aid to Israel.
Other members and candidates in the party still back Iron Dome funding from the U.S. seek to condition offensive weapons sales on Israel’s compliance with human rights and international law.
Brad Lander, a Jewish challenger to Rep. Dan Goldman, said last week he would oppose any additional U.S. aid to Israel, arguing the country is in violation of human rights and international law.
Last week, Brad Lander, a Jewish Democrat running for Congress who has described himself as a liberal Zionist, on Friday joined the calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, while adding that “Israel should have access to purchase it with their own funds.” Lander, who has been “primary approved” to challenge Rep. Dan Goldman of New York — who is the official J Street pick in the race — told the Forward he did not coordinate his announcement with the group’s, which came after his.
Democrats are already taking legislative action. The Senate is expected to vote on Wednesday on two measures — filed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont Independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel — to restrict at least $660 million in weapons sales to Israel. A record 27 Senate Democrats — a majority of the caucus — supported a similar pair of resolutions to block weapons transfers. J Streets urged members to vote in favor. In the House, the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel, currently has 60 sponsors.
J Street’s red line
Ben-Ami maintained that J Street’s updated stance to end grants, known as the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, aligns with calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, to gradually “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade until it reaches zero. “This reform would normalize the relationship and place Israel in the same category as other capable allies that purchase U.S. defense equipment without subsidy,” Ben-Ami said.
Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior vice president and chief policy officer and previously an aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said the organization will still support the sale of Iron Dome components and other missile defense systems as long as it’s consistent with U.S. law and aligns with U.S. policy objectives and interests.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in politics, where Israel policy and Palestinian rights have become a litmus test for progressive candidates. Recent polls showed the tensions within the Democratic Party, which loomed large in the 2024 presidential election in the wake of the Gaza war — and now opposition to the war in Iran — are likely to shape the midterm elections.
J Street PAC is backing 133 House and Senate incumbents as well as Democratic challengers running against Republican incumbents. The group has also approved several candidates competing in open Democratic primaries, allowing its donor network to support their campaigns
Speaking with the Forward during J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. last month, Ben-Ami outlined the organization’s red lines for endorsements. “If you’re in favor of a complete arms embargo against Israel, and you don’t recognize that Israel should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, you won’t come anywhere near our list,” Ben-Ami said.
A recent poll commissioned by the organization found that 70% of American Jews support placing some conditions on military assistance, including 26% who favor halting aid altogether.
The departure from the long-standing bipartisan consensus backing unconditional military support for Israel has drawn criticism from some Israel supporters.
Joel Rubin, a national security expert and a former Obama administration official who was the founding political and government affairs director at J Street in 2008, called it a “major shift” that “undermines” pro-Israel organizational support for the U.S.-Israel security assistance relationship and also “puts more pressure” on Democrats to oppose aid to Israel. “J Street is playing with fire regarding the US.-Israel relationship,” he said. “It’s much easier to tear down a relationship than it is to build one up.”
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