How one non-profit trains Jews to deal with terrorists, ambushes and helped end an armed standoff in Texas

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 a...