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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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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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