When a gunman from England took four people hostage last month in a synagogue near Fort Worth, Texas, a high-tech command center in a nondescript office building in River North sprang into action.
Secure Community Network monitors threats against Jewish communities across the United States. It was alerted after police arrived at the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue. The Chicago command center immediately notified the FBI and the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Inside Congregation Beth Israel synagogue, the rabbi and three congregants later said they relied on the training they got from Secure Community Network, which had conducted an in-person safety session there Aug. 22.
The hostages, who all ended up safe, said they used what they’d learned to identify the nearest exits, to quietly communicate by tapping each other softly on the shoulder and to position their chairs to try to keep any bullets their captor might fire from striking them.
The gunman, Malik Faisal Akram, agreed to let one hostage go as a sign of goodwill but was growing increasingly agitated.
That prompted another hostage, Jeffrey Cohen, to throw a chair at Akram as a diversion.
He and the remaining hostages escaped, and law enforcement officers entered the building, fatally shooting Akram.
Cohen said afterward that the Secure Community Network training “saved our lives.”
It’s unclear why Akram targeted the synagogue.
During a conversation with hostage negotiators, Akram mentioned a woman who’s in prison for trying to shoot American military officers in Afghanistan in 2008, according to the FBI.
Akram’s brother, who got on the phone with him and urged him to release the hostages, said he didn’t know anything about that. His brother was mentally unstable, but he didn’t think he harbored antisemitic beliefs, he told The New York Times.
Michael Masters, the chief executive officer of Secure Community Network, says that, with acts of violence, cyberattacks and hate messages against Jews escalating in recent years, “We’re in a race against time.”
Masters, an ex-Marine, was chief of staff to former Chicago police Supt. Jody Weis. He joined Secure Community Network in 2017 and hired intelligence experts to build the Chicago command center, which monitors thousands of potential threats to Jewish communities across the country every day.
On a giant computer screen in the dimly lit command center, blue dots represent thousands of Jewish facilities across the country. Red flags show potential risks in real time.
One day this past week, the screen denoted 1,645 “risk events” in the previous 24 hours.
On Tuesday, Masters and Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was one of the Texas hostages, testified virtually before a congressional committee about the Jan. 15 attack. Cytron-Walker said he welcomed Akram to the synagogue after he said he spent the night outside in the cold. The rabbi said he served him tea and, based on his demeanor, didn’t think Akram posed a risk.
“Obviously, I was wrong,” Cytron-Walker said.
He and Masters called on Congress to provide more funding for nonprofits and religious institutions to protect them from terrorist attacks and hate crimes.
Many Jewish organizations have greatly expanded their security operations over the past five years. In 2017, there were 22 full-time security directors for Jewish federations, which are located in most U.S. cities, Masters says. Now, he says, there are 50 such directors, including Daniel Godsel, a retired Chicago police deputy chief who’s in charge of security for the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
“We assess that we’re living the most complex and dynamic threat environment facing the Jewish community and the country at any time in the nation’s history,” Masters says. “There’s been an increase in antisemitic incidents. There have been an increasing number of attacks. I mean, prior to COVID happening, we had four [deadly] attacks in the community in under 18 months.”
Those included:
- Eleven people killed by a gunman at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018.
- A woman killed and three others wounded at the Poway synagogue in San Diego in April 2019.
- A rabbi killed in a machete attack at his home in Monsey, New York.
- Two workers and a student killed at a Jewish kosher deli in Jersey City, New Jersey, in December 2019.
Authorities said the two assailants, who shared antisemitic and anti-police beliefs, also killed a cop before being killed by police.
Property crimes targeting Jews — such as the vandalism at Jewish facilities in late January in West Rogers Park — also are on the rise, according to Masters.
He says Secure Community Network notifies the FBI when it spots white supremacists or other hate groups targeting multiple cities with identical threats against Jews in flyers or on the Internet.
“We have a direct plug-in with the FBI’s national threat center in West Virginia,” Masters says. “We’re the only faith-based entity in the U.S. that has that relationship.”
He says his analysts track antisemitic communications on the dark web as well as on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
One analyst previously worked for NASA. Some were in law enforcement. One was an official with the Antarctic Fire Department. Another was a contractor who worked with social media companies to identify attempts to sway elections through fraud.
According to Masters, over the past year, those analysts have followed a white supremacist online as he made threats against Jews in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities. He’s now being held in Ohio for a probation violation while the FBI and other agencies investigate, Masters says.
He says anti-Jewish threats on the Internet have shot up during the pandemic. They account for 40% of the alerts Secure Community Network gets.
“They’re attempting to deface websites, they are making personal threats against members of the community,” he says. “It can be as simple as cyber fraud.
“It emanates not just from everyday criminals and hackers. We know individuals and entities associated with both foreign non-state and state actors. It’s a big concern.”
Masters says his organization and Jewish facilities across the country will grapple even more with security concerns when the pandemic comes to an end and things return to normal.
“How do you balance being welcoming and open while being safe and secure with an increasingly diverse community?” he says. “It’s something we have to deal with every single day in every city.”
