With violent antisemitic incidents reaching all time highs across the country, a Chicago-based non-profit is teaching Jews how to protect themselves and, in some cases, how to fight back.
Since its founding in 2004, Secure Community Network (SCN) has already trained tens of thousands of people in the Jewish community in the US and Canada on how to survive a terrorist situation and how to outfit synagogues and other public spaces with simple emergency measures such as automatic lock doors to ensure maximum protection.
SCN also helps community groups write grants to the Department of Homeland Security to ask for financing for new security measures.
The goal, according to Michael Masters, SCN’s National Director and CEO, is “to train and empower the community” especially in the wake of the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh which left 11 dead; as well as the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead.
Earlier this month, the group uncovered an online terrorist tool-kit that had been circulating among Columbia University anti-Israel protestors, complete with instructions on where to acquire sledgehammers, how to use them to break windows and how to cause as much damage as possible on college campuses.
The 14-page manual from a group called Palestine Action, a UK-based collective that uses “disruptive tactics” against “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex,” according to its website, where it singles out Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest producer of weapons.
“We have learned by experience over 3,500 years that antisemitism is never going to go away,” said Masters, 46.
Masters is a former Marine with a law degree from Harvard University, who began working on strategic planning for the group in 2015.
He took over SCN two years later, he said, and under his leadership the group has grown exponentially from a five-person operation to a security agency employing more than 100 employees across the country and with a budget of more than $25 million, paid for through donations from Jewish federations.
Among SCN’s investigators and trainers are former FBI analysts and other retired law enforcement who have the ability to monitor threats and alert community leaders and synagogues 24 hours a day.
When a deranged intruder burst into a synagogue during a Shabbat service and pulled out a gun in Texas three years ago, the handful of congregants knew how to save themselves.
After a more than 10-hour standoff, the gunman, British national Malik Faisal Akram, ordered the congregation to their knees. However, the rabbi told the hostages to run and threw a chair in the direction of the kidnapper, which ended the standoff. Akram was then killed by police.
Many of the congregants at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville had received training from SCN, and used the tactics they had learned, such as moving as far away from the gunman as they could and gradually moving in the direction of the exit during the standoff.
“The training kept us safe,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an engineer, who was one of the four hostages at the Colleyville synagogue. “The purpose of the training was to teach people to be aware, to run, hide, fight in an emergency to get yourself out of trouble.”
Colley, 62, said he tripped running out the door of the synagogue and crawled under a hedgerow as a platoon of FBI agents swarmed into the temple to apprehend the assailant.
“We knew what to do and we saved ourselves,” Cohen told The Post, adding he now speaks at synagogues and other community groups, urging their leaders to adopt the same training he received.
After the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the group recorded more than 5,400 threats against Jewish groups — more than double the amount in 2022, said a spokesman for SCN.
“I’m proud and honored everyday when people come to our command center in Chicago, when they see what we do and they walk out saying ‘I feel so much better knowing that this is here,” said Masters.
“We’ve lived too long in the world looking over our shoulder. It’s time for the bad guys to be looking over theirs.”
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