WESTCHESTER COUNTY, New York — A woman in a black jacket, black pants and dark sunglasses emerged from a bank and stepped into the bright morning sunlight on the main street of a small town north of New York City. A passerby with a flannel shirt tied around her waist snapped a furtive photo of the woman, and a man began to tail her from the opposite side of the street, noting the precise time and location of her stops and movements.

An hour later, all three were debriefing in a nearby conference room. The woman in black was a trainer for the Community Security Service, a nonprofit that trains volunteer synagogue guards throughout the US, and the two surveilling her were participants in a training program. The exercise was part of a three-day course for 10 CSS volunteers at the organization’s new facility in Westchester County.

The facility, the first in the US dedicated to training synagogue guards, is part of the group’s expanding efforts to protect Jewish institutions, as American Jews build out an array of connected security measures amid a global surge in antisemitism.

CSS granted The Times of Israel exclusive access to the training facility on the condition that it not divulge the building’s location, volunteers’ identities, or certain details of the group’s protocols, due to security concerns.

CSS was established as a non-profit by several congregants at a New York City synagogue in 2007. The group is modeled on volunteer guard programs for Jewish communities in Europe, where security became a concern before it became one in the US.

Richard Priem, the group’s CEO, got his start as a volunteer guard when he was a teenager growing up in Amsterdam in the early 2000s. At the start of the training, the group watched a short documentary on a deadly shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

“We never thought that in the United States people would start feeling that way as well. We always thought that this is something that happens in Europe, in the Middle East, but there are two places where Jews are safe. One is Israel,” Priem told the guards at the start of the training. “The other was the United States, and we’ve seen now that’s no longer the case.”

Security efforts for US Jews gained steam after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. More deadly attacks on Jews followed, in Poway, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Monsey, New York. The October 2023 Hamas assault on Israel and ensuing wave of antisemitism was another shock to US Jews.

CSS expanded as those fears grew, and now counts around 5,000 active volunteers in 25 states. In the past five years, CSS’s staff has grown from two to 20.

One of the guards at the course, a woman in her 50s from New York, started with CSS eight years ago. She saw attitudes toward security start to change with the Tree of Life shooting.

“That really brought it home. It could happen to any synagogue, any school,” she said. “When I first started, people didn’t take it as seriously. ‘Why do we have to do this? Why do you have to check my bag?’ It was a pain. Over the years, people are used to it and they appreciate it.”

CSS trained local leaders on an ad hoc basis, using a one-on-one mentoring model in their communities. Those local leaders would then pass the training on to rank-and-file volunteers.

As the group grew, its leadership realized it needed a more formal training system, an established curriculum, and a central location to bring together volunteers from around the US for more advanced training. In 2022,........

© The Times of Israel