The Sacred and the Guarded: 25 Years After 9/11, Rosh Hashanah Arrives Behind Locked Doors

At sundown this Friday—September 11, a date that still arrives like a scar—America’s Jewish families will do something their grandparents could scarcely have imagined: they will walk through armed checkpoints to pray. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year that ushers in 5787, falls this year on the 25th anniversary of the attacks that murdered nearly 3,000 people and tore a hole in the American idea of safety. And so the two dates, one of national grief and one of renewal, will converge at the synagogue door. Inside, the liturgy will speak of life and death, of who shall live and who shall die; outside, the security guards will keep their eyes on the street. It did not always look this way. When Rosh Hashanah came just six days after 9/11 in 2001, the idea of a permanent armed presence at a Jewish house of worship was still unusual enough to draw stares. A quarter of a century later, in Jewish communities from New York to Los Angeles, from Detroit to Miami, it is simply the cost of admission. The convergence is deeply symbolic, because the aftershocks of that Tuesday morning became the architecture of Jewish life in America. They are the reason synagogues have double doors and guarded vestibules, why volunteers in neon vests stand watch while families inside sing ancient prayers, and why the High Holiday checklist now includes emergency action plans alongside honey and apples. The children who slide their backpacks past the security cameras are too young to remember 2001; their parents were children themselves. But they inherit its lesson: that attentiveness is a form of love, that vigilance can be a blessing, and that the shofar’s blast is greatest when it is heard from behind a locked door. The story of these 25 years is not the story of fear conquering faith. It is the story of a community that chose to gather anyway—and built an entire infrastructure, human and institutional, to make the gathering possible.

Eric Fingerhut, the president and CEO of Jewish Federations of North America, sees the convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah as a powerful reminder of how far the community has traveled. In an interview with Fox News Digital, he traced the evolution simply: before the attacks, synagogues might ask police to direct traffic on the High Holidays, or install a basic alarm system, but there was no widespread belief that Jewish communal life needed protection against physical threats. That changed when the towers fell. The Jewish community understood, Fingerhut said, that the hijackers were attacking America that day, but that they held a special animus for Jews and the Jewish state. That realization reshaped communal priorities. It gave birth to the Secure Community Network, created in the years after 9/11 as a unified channel between Jewish institutions and federal law enforcement, and it began a transformation that is still unfolding. Today, Rosh Hashanah preparation means apples and honey, prayer books, the shofar—and also secured entrances, emergency response drills, and congregants who trade their prayer shawls for volunteer vests to stand watch while their neighbors pray. What once seemed paranoid is now routine. What once seemed unimaginable—a sanctuary with a security checkpoint—is now accepted as normal, even necessary. But the new reality carries a staggering price, and the human cost is harder to measure than the financial one. Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side described the sharp contrast to Fox News Digital: walk past the churches on his block and the doors are wide open, inviting strangers in; walk past his synagogue and you see security cameras, a double-door system, and a line of guards, at the cost of untold thousands of dollars per year. He calls it a vicious tax on the Jewish community, levied by antisemites—a tax that no family should ever have to pay in order to practice their faith.

The scale of that tax is now measured in the billions. A national study by Jewish Federations of North America found that Jewish communal institutions spend an estimated $1 billion annually on security—nearly $2.8 million every single day, based on an examination of more than 4,500 institutions, simply to keep Jewish life open and accessible. One full-time security guard costs roughly $90,000 per year. The organization now leads a national initiative placing professional security directors across all 141 Federation communities, because the need has expanded far beyond large synagogues in major cities. From Michigan to Florida to Los Angeles, ordinary worshipers are training in situational awareness, access control, surveillance detection, emergency response, and coordination with law enforcement. The Community Security Service, a volunteer organization, reported that more than 20,000 people completed its training in 2025 alone. Of those, 6,100 volunteers protected 440 synagogues and nearly 100 Jewish events, logging more than 300,000 guard hours across 24 states. Behind them stands the Secure Community Network, which provides national intelligence and coordination: in 2025 it recorded 4,400 incident reports, trained 40,000 people, and made 851 referrals to law enforcement. Michael Masters, SCN’s national director and CEO, told Fox News Digital that the threat environment is accelerating, and yet the community has never been more prepared or more engaged. He noted that his Duty Desk alone logged nearly 3,200 threat incidents in the past year, pacing ahead of the year before. What this means, in human terms, is that when a family walks into services this Rosh Hashanah, their safety does not rest on luck. It rests on an invisible army of professionals and volunteers, on cameras and double doors, on plans practiced in advance and relationships built with police—all of it designed so that the prayers inside can go on.

The need for such vigilance is no longer abstract. The FBI recorded 1,528 hate crime incidents targeting Jews in 2025, representing 63% of the nation’s 2,408 religiously motivated incidents—and although Jews constitute only about 2% of the U.S. population, incidents targeting them represented 14% of all hate crimes reported nationwide. In New York City, new NYPD figures show that during the first eight months of 2026, major crime fell 6.2% while confirmed hate crimes targeting Jews rose 8%, from 212 to 229—an average of nearly one such crime every 25 hours. Rabbi Steinmetz observed that threats to the Jewish community exploded after October 7th, saying that hatred of Israel encourages antisemites to come out of the woodwork. The fears are grounded in recent memory. On August 14, a man was charged with disrupting a Friday night service attended by roughly 375 people at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, damaging ceremonial candlesticks, assaulting a congregant and a security guard, and drawing federal hate crime charges. Five months earlier, in West Bloomfield, Michigan, an attacker inspired by Hezbollah rammed a pickup truck carrying gasoline and fireworks through the doors of Temple Israel, according to the FBI. Armed with a rifle and hundreds of rounds, he struck a security guard and exchanged gunfire before being stopped. Inside the building were 140 children at the synagogue’s early childhood center. That every child and staff member walked out unharmed, and that the guard survived, is a testament to the very security infrastructure the community has built. For Steven Ingber, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Detroit, that assault remains fresh as families prepare to gather once again. The community will enter the High Holidays vigilant and prepared, he said, but also with confidence and pride. Rabbi Aaron Starr of Congregation Shaarey Zedek, who also serves as president of the Michigan Board of Rabbis, spoke of entering the new year with heaviness: marking 25 years since 9/11 while also marking six months since the attack on their own community and especially its children. And yet, he added, they are filled with hope for a better tomorrow.

That hope is not naive; it is disciplined. It is the hope of a community that has learned, the hard way, that security is not the opposite of openness but the condition of it. As Fingerhut put it, no family should have to weigh their safety against their faith—and the purpose of all the guards, cameras, and training is precisely to ensure they never have to. The visible presence of security, he said, is what enables and encourages people to come out and participate in Jewish life. Without it, fear would do what terrorists could not: empty the pews, silence the shofar, and close the doors of Jewish community life by making the price of participation feel too high. And so the leaders and organizations that now form the backbone of Jewish safety are also advocates for greater federal support. The bipartisan Jewish American Security Act would strengthen security assistance for at-risk nonprofit institutions, helping to ease the extraordinary burden on a community already stretched by the demands of vigilance. Local efforts continue as well: New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness said it is coordinating with the state Attorney General, state police, the FBI’s Newark field office, local law enforcement, and community partners to protect houses of worship, with the stated goal of helping every New Jerseyan practice their faith without fear. The NYPD, for its part, said it will hold a High Holiday briefing and provide additional security details.

The deepest meaning of this year’s convergence, however, lies not in budgets or briefings but in the quiet determination of ordinary people. When the sun sets on Friday and the families arrive—the children in their holiday clothes, the elderly leaning on the arms of their children, the young couples and the old friends—they will pass through the checkpoint, and then they will take their seats. The shofar will sound, carrying across 25 years of change, and the prayers will rise. The guard outside will stand at his post, and inside, the community will do what it has always done: celebrate the new year, remember the old one, and hope. The experts say it plainly: the point of every guard, every camera, every volunteer is not to turn a synagogue into a fortress. It is to ensure that Jewish life continues inside. It is to ensure that the ancient words are still spoken, that the apples are still dipped in honey, that the children still learn their history, and that fear does not win. Eric Fingerhut’s message to Jewish communities in America and around the world is simple and clear: do not retreat; lean into Jewish life. The security is there so that everyone can feel confident in their involvement, so that the choice to participate is never a choice made out of fear. Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the gates of the synagogue are guarded, but the doors are open. And that, perhaps, is the most human response of all—to stand watch against the darkness, and still to gather in the light.