Announcing Major Achievements in Securing our Community’s Jewish Spaces

Announcing Major Achievements in Securing our Community’s Jewish Spaces

Zach Benjamin | Chief Executive Officer, Jewish Long Beach

Our Jewish communal institutions are designed to be warm, welcoming, safe spaces where all are free to exercise our values through learning, recreation, volunteerism, and service to both the Jewish and broad communities. As a child attending religious school at Temple Judea in the San Fernando Valley, and later at Congregation Shaarai Tzedek in Tampa, Florida, I perceived physical threats to Jewish people and places as a phenomenon reserved for those residing in Soviet Jewish communities and other maligned corners of the our diaspora, from which our American Jewish communal organizations— shielded by our bubble of relative geopolitical stability and social tolerance—was working at the time to extract them.

Unfortunately, we now understand that antiJewish violence knows no borders, and here on our own shores, too many of our communities have fallen victim to the most vicious imaginable brand of lethal intimidation and prejudice. From Pittsburgh to Poway, Colleyville to Charlottesville, on college campuses across North America, and beyond, Jewish lives and identity remain under threat from elements that transcend the political and ideological spectrum.

According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center, anti-Jewish acts remain, by a wide margin, the most common hate crime committed against a religious group in the United States, accounting for more than half of such transgressions reported to law enforcement each year. In fact, more than 10% of all reported hate crimes, regardless of motivation, are committed against Jews and Jewish communities. Jewish people comprise approximately 2% of the population of the United States, and so the extent to which we are targets of violent bias far outpaces our numbers.

Thus, as leaders and stewards of Jewish life, we bear responsibility not only to ensure that our community’s Jewish infrastructure is vibrant and sustainable, but also to secure and protect, by any method within our capability, all who entrust us with their own lives and those of their children.

To this end, I am thrilled to announce that, late last year, Jewish Long Beach welcomed our firstever full-time Director of Community Security, Meredith Burke, who brings to us over two decades of federal law enforcement experience, most recently as head of the FBI’s Long Beach Field Office. Meredith is employed jointly by Jewish Long Beach and the Secure Community Network (SCN), a nationwide security and intelligence service funded and operated collaboratively by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. SCN’s mission is, “via its operations center and Duty Desk, [to] provide timely, credible threat and incident information to both law enforcement and community partners, and to serve as the [Jewish] community’s formal liaison with state and local law enforcement [agencies].”

Meredith and our partnership with SCN enable Jewish Long Beach and the Alpert JCC to enjoy seamless collaboration and communication with a wide variety of both local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as dedicated security services, training, and expertise, leaving us better prepared than ever before to weather security-related contingencies. Meredith’s arrival and the creation of her position also enable our broader Jewish community to anticipate and mitigate situations that may pose threats to our people or spaces.

Additionally, I am also pleased to reveal that Jewish Long Beach and the AJCC have received a $300,000 LiveSecure Grant from SCN and JFNA, which will fuel training, professional threat and vulnerability assessments, Federal Nonprofit Security Grant application assistance, and a wide variety of additional security assets, not only for our campus, but for our entire Jewish community and its institutions over the course of the next three years. Jewish Long Beach is the first Jewish federation in California to receive this grant, which places us firmly at the vanguard of Jewish communal security, not only in our state, but on a nationwide scale.

Over the course of the 14 months since our agencies’ integration, Jewish Long Beach and the Alpert JCC have established security as our top operational priority. We are confident that this commitment and investment will ensure that those who participate in learning, wellness, mindfulness, worship, reflection, and recreation on our campus can do so with peaceful hearts, assured that they and their loved ones remain safe and joyful in our spaces.