At sundown on Friday, Jewish families across America will welcome Rosh Hashanah as the nation marks 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
They will arrive carrying prayer books and thoughts of apples, honey, and the year ahead. They will also walk past armed guards, surveillance cameras, and secured entrances.
Sept. 11 will forever be remembered as the day the threat of Islamist terrorism struck the American homeland on an unprecedented scale. It was not an attack on Jews alone. It was an attack on America, and it transformed security across the country.
To me, one of the least understood legacies of that day is this: Everyone remembers how 9/11 changed the airport. Far fewer realize it also changed the synagogue.
I asked Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of Jewish Federations of North America, to trace how that transformation unfolded. He described not one turning point, but a series of them, each changing how American Jewish communities understood their own vulnerability.
After 9/11, attacks against Jewish communities elsewhere in the world no longer felt safely distant.
“We came to realize that these things could happen here as well,” Fingerhut told me.
That realization led Jewish Federations of North America to help create the Secure Community Network, originally as one of its own programs and later as an independent organization that remains a close partner.
“The goal of that creation was two things,” Fingerhut said. “One, it was to help communities start to think about what a security model for their community would look like, and secondly, to speak with one voice to federal law enforcement, especially the FBI and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.”
The model centered on a professional security director with law enforcement experience who could work with every synagogue, school, and Jewish community center, create common standards, and coordinate with police.
But the system did not expand overnight.
From 9/11 until the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, Fingerhut said, Jewish communal security experienced “a very steady but modest development.”
By the time of the attack, he estimated that only about a dozen communities had some form of professional security program.
Tree of Life shattered any remaining assumption that a peaceful neighborhood could insulate Jews from murderous antisemitism.
“There couldn’t be a quieter, safer-feeling community,” Fingerhut said of Squirrel Hill. “Obviously, it can happen anywhere.”
That recognition demanded more than grief. It demanded a national response within Jewish communal life.
“We made the determination that every community needed to have a community security program with a full-time community security director, a community plan, work with local law enforcement,” Fingerhut said.
The Tree of Life massacre was followed by attacks in Poway, Jersey City, and Monsey. Fingerhut was then leading Hillel International, but those attacks shaped his thinking as he considered moving to Jewish Federations of North America.
“This was absolutely one of the issues that was on my mind when I was considering the position,” he said.
His view of the threat had expanded beyond the university setting.
“The college campus was only one place where the Jewish community was unsafe,” Fingerhut said. “We needed to address it comprehensively.”
I understood what he meant. In January 2020, I joined thousands marching across the Brooklyn Bridge following a wave of antisemitic attacks in New York. At the time, I was serving as director of Jewish Community Relations at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey.
The march reflected a sobering recognition: Jewish security could no longer be addressed one synagogue or one neighborhood at a time. Security had become a collective responsibility.
Fingerhut emphasized that the local federations assumed that responsibility by providing leadership and funding. Some operate security programs directly, while others work with SCN. Either way, he said, the system must protect every part of Jewish life.
“It can’t just serve the Orthodox community or the Reform community or the day schools and JCCs,” Fingerhut said. “It has to serve everybody.”
The scale of the transformation is measurable. Fingerhut estimated that only about a dozen communities had security programs when Tree of Life was attacked. Today, professionally run initiatives operate across all 141 Jewish Federation communities.
A new JFNA study found that more than 4,500 Jewish institutions collectively spend $1.015 billion annually on security, a 33% increase from the previous estimate.
This is the overlooked legacy of 9/11: Jewish security is no longer improvised at the synagogue door. It has become a national system built to keep Jewish life functioning.
Fingerhut described the period between Tree of Life and Oct. 7, 2023, as one of “very rapid growth and development” for those community programs.
Their importance became clear after Oct. 7. Demonstrations and confrontations appeared not only on college campuses but in city halls, on streets, and outside synagogues. Jewish institutions already had professionals assessing threats and communicating with law enforcement.
“The fact that you had this professional security apparatus interacting with local law enforcement really did protect the Jewish community,” Fingerhut said.
But his account did not end there. The killings of Israeli Embassy employees Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the deadly attack in Boulder, and the burning of a historic Mississippi synagogue have brought the community to another turning point.
“We’re facing a new and heightened environment,” Fingerhut said. “While we built a very important security infrastructure since 9/11, over the last 25 years, we’re now at another inflection point that requires another level of security investment for our community.”
His 25-year account leads to an unavoidable conclusion: Security is not a temporary response to one attack. The threats have evolved, and the infrastructure protecting Jewish life must evolve with them.
We have accepted the guards, cameras, and secured entrances because they are necessary. That acceptance is not defeat. It is a responsibility.
The purpose of this security is found not in the barriers themselves, but in what they make possible.
“There’s a surge of interest in Jewish life,” Fingerhut said. “They want to participate, but they have to know that it’s safe.”
As Rosh Hashanah begins and Jewish communities move toward Yom Kippur, the guards will stand outside, and the cameras will remain on. Inside, families will welcome the new year, ask forgiveness, hear the shofar, and return to traditions that have sustained the Jewish people for generations.
I STOOD OUTSIDE AN ARMORED SYNAGOGUE IN ISTANBUL AND REALIZED WHY I’M A ZIONIST
The guards outside our synagogues tell the story of how our threats have changed. The Jewish life continuing inside tells the far more important story of how we have responded.
We will meet every threat with vigilance, but terrorism will not silence our prayers, empty our synagogues, or dictate the future of Jewish life.
Ariella Noveck is a journalist specializing in antisemitism and Middle East affairs, with extensive experience covering Jewish communities worldwide. She can be followed on X and Instagram @AriellaNoveck