Counter-terror training comes as Mamdani curtails policing

‘Eyes and ears of the Jewish community’: NYC’s Shomrim watch groups take up counter-terrorism

Once only trained to prevent street crime, teams now receive lessons on counter-terror tactics and spotting threats, bringing the local patrollers deeper into overall Jewish security network

NEW YORK — The Jewish community security coordinator, standing in a wash of colored light from the synagogue’s stained glass windows, asked the Orthodox patrol members seated in the pews about potential terrorist targets in New York City.

The attendees suggested synagogues, the subway system, Yankee Stadium and Wall Street.

“Yankee Stadium. Why is that a good target?” the instructor said.

“The amount of people. The economy,” one of the patrol members said.

The Monday session was part of a push to extend counter-terrorism training to New York City’s Shomrim neighborhood patrol groups, opening another layer of Jewish community protection amid a surge in terror threats against Diaspora Jews.

The training marks a paradigm shift for the Shomrim, who tend to focus on street crime, not terror threats. The move is significant because the Shomrim represent one of the largest Jewish security forces in the city and are a regular presence on the streets of neighborhoods with large Jewish populations.

The Shomrim are not being repurposed, but will continue their normal duties, with a layer of counter-terror training on top of their focus on crime.

The Community Security Initiative (CSI), a group that coordinates security in the New York region, ran the session for Shomrim patrols from around the city. CSI and Shomrim have collaborated in the past, but the session marked their first joint counter-terrorism training.

The groups are part of an interlocking network of Jewish security outfits in the US covering intelligence, training, on-the-ground protection, grant applications, self-defense classes and cybersecurity. The organizations collaborate with each other and with law enforcement. Monday’s training brought the Shomrim, which operate within local Orthodox communities, further into that wider network.

The event, held in the sanctuary of a Jewish center in Midwood, Brooklyn, brought in around 150 members of Shomrim patrol units from areas including Flatbush, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, south Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens. Each neighborhood’s patrol operates independently, although there is some coordination between the different areas.

CSI is planning further Shomrim counter-terror training sessions in other areas of the city, said Mitch Silber, the head of CSI and the former director of the NYPD’s intelligence analysis unit. CSI is a joint initiative by the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

Shomrim, Hebrew for “guards” or “watchers,” patrol Orthodox and Hasidic neighborhoods for incidents such as crime and lost persons, in coordination with local police, but have not previously focused on counter-terrorism.

“Shomrim was created to fight local crime — burglaries, car break-ins and stuff like that, assaults and robberies, and now there is a new dimension,” said Mendy Hershkop of the Crown Heights Shomrim. “We are starting to be used as a counter-terrorism tool as well.”

The new program complements street patrols launched this year by the Community Security Service, a group that trains volunteer guards to protect synagogues and Jewish events. Those patrols, with support and funding from CSI and the UJA-Federation of New York, are active in Manhattan and the Bronx, areas with smaller Orthodox populations where Shomrim are less active.

The counter-terrorism training for Shomrim is meant to cover other areas of the city, in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, where the watch groups are based, for more comprehensive coverage to prevent attacks in the city.

The program is partly a response to the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani due to his plans to scale back policing. Mamdani has proposed measures, including limiting police overtime and nixing the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a unit that responds to protests and has come under criticism from Mamdani’s leftist base. Last week, Mamdani vetoed legislation for handling protests near schools, drawing an outcry from Jewish groups.

“Who’s more likely to see suspicious activity?” Silber said of Shomrim. “They’re sensors that are walking the streets of the community.”

Jews in New York City are targeted in hate crimes more than all other groups combined, and there have been several recent, thwarted attempts at terror attacks against Jews in the city, including a neo-Nazi who plotted to poison Jewish children and a Pakistani national arrested in Canada who was planning a terror attack against New York Jews on the anniversary of October 7.

The US Jewish community has invested heavily in security since a spate of deadly terror attacks killed 15 Jews in 2018 and 2019. The Jewish Federations of North America estimates that US Jewish organizations spend around $765 million annually on security, around 14% of the typical institution’s budget.

The attendees at Monday’s event were Orthodox or Hasidic, many wearing black windbreakers with their neighborhood’s name on the back and walkie-talkies on their hips, chatting in English and Yiddish.

The CSI instructors, former NYPD personnel, introduced the organization, listing some of its successes in preventing attacks, including a 2022 incident that saw two men plotting to “shoot up a synagogue” and a man from Utah last year who had threatened a synagogue and was arrested while entering New York City.

The team mapped out a “concentric circles” theory of preventing terror threats, from intelligence detection to hardening targets and the immediate response to an attack. The goal is to stop an attack as far out as possible, for example, by detecting threats on social media that can be relayed to law enforcement and personnel on the ground.

“CSI is really good and robust at the intelligence, at the intel levels. They have their analysts at their desks and they’re monitoring the web,” Hershkop said. “The Shomrim patrols in their local places, which we all work together, are getting the physical calls from the people in the community when there’s a suspicious person, a suspicious car, something doesn’t belong.”

“We put our two capabilities together. We’re boots on the ground and we are now learning about situational awareness,” he said.

The threats come from four “vectors,” the instructors said — Iran, the Islamic State, homegrown violent extremists, and racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists.

The instructors walked the Shomrim through the typical cycle of a terror attack, from selecting a target to pre-attack surveillance and execution. The instructors used the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as an example, showing a video report about preparations for the attack and pointing out where it could have been prevented.

“As we get further into the plan, it’s going to be harder and harder to catch,” the instructor said, urging the Shomrim to practice keeping an eye out for anything out of place, such as someone wearing a heavy jacket in warm weather.

“You guys are the eyes and ears of the Jewish community,” he said.

The CSI staffers related the lesson to familiar terms, comparing the practice of “looking for exceptions” while studying the Gemara text to picking out suspicious activity on the street, or spotting car thieves scoping out vehicles — a more common problem for Shomrim — to potential attackers surveilling a target.

“It makes for a much more professional, much more robust, a much more effective security detail and we keep the community safer,” Hershkop said. “What happens all over the world, especially in Iran and Israel and all, has a direct impact here.”