No Ceasefire for Diaspora Jewry

This past weekend, while diplomats finalized the terms of a memorandum meant to end the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran, roughly a thousand protesters faced off outside a synagogue in London. By the time police finished making arrests on Sunday, fourteen people had been detained on charges ranging from violent disorder to common assault, after a demonstration the Board of Deputies of British Jews called an act of intimidation against the Jewish community.

The diplomats’ own signing ceremony, set for Friday in Switzerland, will be treated as a milestone: a war with a beginning, a middle, and now, perhaps, an end.
For fifteen years I have worked to identify and preserve the unmarked graves of Jews murdered across Eastern Europe, places where, on paper, the war ended generations ago. That work has taught me one thing: violence against Jews does not follow the calendar diplomats keep. States make peace. The war against Jewish communities does not pause for treaties.

That synagogue was not an isolated target. It was the latest in roughly ten attacks on Jewish communal sites in London since the war with Iran began, including a foiled arson plot and the burning of a memorial to the victims of October 7. Britain already has the highest per-capita rate of antisemitic assaults of any major diaspora community.

Earlier this year in Michigan, a man drove a car loaded with explosives toward Temple Israel, one of the country’s largest Reform synagogues, in West Bloomfield, while roughly 106 young children sat in early childhood classrooms inside. Thankfully, he failed to hurt them; he was the only person killed. Days later, the head of the Anti-Defamation League called 2025 one of the deadliest years for diaspora Jews in modern memory, pointing to places that included Bondi Beach, Australia, where, that December, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration attended by roughly a thousand people. Sixteen people were killed, including a ten-year-old girl, before police shot the attackers. Islamic State claimed responsibility; it remains Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in decades.
These threats come from more than one direction. Some are organized, like the cell behind Bondi Beach. Others are lone actors radicalized in online spaces where, according to that same ADL report, antisemitism increasingly functions less as ideology than as entertainment, content to be produced, shared, and rewarded. Neither kind checks the news for ceasefires.

I am not drawing a line from any government’s policy to any individual attacker. The point is simpler. Diaspora security gets treated, in budgets and in political attention, as a footnote to the “real” conflict overseas: something that spikes after each escalation and fades once a ceasefire is announced. That is backwards. For the families in London, Sydney, or West Bloomfield, there is no ceasefire to look forward to.

There is a concrete step the United States can take, and there is precedent for it. After October 7, 2023, Congress approved a one-time $400 million supplemental for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, the fund that pays for the cameras, alarms, and barriers now standard at synagogues and Jewish day schools, on top of its regular budget, to meet a surge in threats. There is a case for doing it again. As of this spring, roughly $274 million appropriated for the program last year had still not been disbursed. This year’s base appropriation, $300 million, falls below what both the House and Senate had separately proposed; in 2024, nearly 7,600 organizations applied for almost $1 billion in grants, and fewer than half were funded. A group of senators and a coalition of interfaith organizations have separately called for raising the baseline to between $750 million and $1 billion going forward.

This week’s signing will mark an ending, of sorts, for one war. There is no memorandum to sign for the safety of Jews, wherever they live, but in this one case, Congress does not need one. It already has the precedent, the appropriations process, and a backlog of requests sitting in front of it. What is missing is the will to act before the next attack, not after.