There is a new billion-dollar industry in North America, and nobody should be celebrating its growth. According to recently released data from the Jewish Federations of North America, Jewish institutions are now spending more than $1 billion every year simply to keep Jews safe. The estimated annual bill has reached approximately $1.015 billion, up an astonishing 33 percent from $765 million in 2024. Across more than 4,500 synagogues, schools, Jewish community centers, camps and nonprofits, the average security expenditure is now roughly $225,000 per institution. And even that staggering figure does not include the security costs incurred by Jewish-owned private businesses.
But there is an even more important fact hiding behind that billion-dollar headline: this is not the worldwide cost of securing Diaspora Jewry. It represents spending by the North American Jewish institutions included in the survey. It does not attempt to calculate the enormous additional sums being spent protecting Jewish communities across Europe, South America, Australia, Africa and elsewhere. From Paris and London to Buenos Aires and Melbourne, Jewish schools, synagogues and community institutions require their own guards, barriers, cameras, police protection and sophisticated security infrastructure. The true global price of keeping Diaspora Jewish life secure is therefore substantially greater than the already staggering billion-dollar figure.
Think about what that means. Before we educate a Jewish child, feed a poor family, support a kollel, fund a synagogue program or strengthen Jewish identity, enormous amounts of Jewish communal and government resources are being spent simply defending the front door. Armed guards, cameras, bullet-resistant glass, electronic access systems, concrete barriers, security consultants, police details, emergency training and threat monitoring have become routine expenses. The infrastructure necessary simply to gather as Jews has become one of the defining costs of Diaspora Jewish communal life.
And remarkably, the communal response is largely to demand more security money. Jewish organizations are understandably lobbying governments for increased security funding because the threats are real and existing resources are inadequate. But perhaps there is a more fundamental question that nobody wants to ask: How many billions are we prepared to spend making an increasingly hostile exile tolerable?
Let me be perfectly clear. I am not arguing against protecting Jewish institutions. As long as Jews live in environments where synagogues, schools and community centers are targets, failing to secure them would be irresponsible. Security professionals save lives, and institutions facing genuine threats must take those threats seriously. But there is an enormous difference between an emergency measure and a long-term Jewish strategy. Security may treat the symptom. It cannot cure the disease.
Imagine, for a moment, if that same $1 billion every single year were invested aggressively in Aliyah. And remember: we are using only the North American figure. Imagine what the number would become if even a portion of the billions being spent globally to secure Diaspora Jewish life were redirected or matched toward bringing Jews home. Imagine subsidized flights, employment assistance, Hebrew education, professional licensing, housing assistance, mortgage support, schools and intensive absorption programs. Imagine telling every Jewish family seriously considering Aliyah: Money will not be the obstacle. We will help you come home.
One billion dollars could provide $20,000 in direct assistance to 50,000 olim every year. At $10,000 per person, it could assist 100,000. Over a decade, even without increasing the annual expenditure, we are talking about more than $10 billion that could be directed toward helping Jews build permanent lives in the Jewish homeland. And again, that calculation begins with North America alone. Instead, enormous sums throughout the Jewish world are being spent reinforcing doors in countries our ancestors once prayed to leave.
There is something tragically backward about this picture. For two thousand years Jews prayed three times every day for the return to Jerusalem. At weddings we broke a glass remembering Jerusalem. At the Seder we declared, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Generations dreamed of a Jewish state capable of receiving them. Today that state exists. There are cities, universities, yeshivot, hospitals and industries, protected by a Jewish army defending a sovereign Jewish homeland. Yet when antisemitism explodes in the Diaspora, our institutional instinct is still primarily to build a higher wall around the exile.
We have effectively created an enormous Galus maintenance budget. And perhaps the most painful irony is that throughout Jewish history, our enemies forced us into ghettos. They built the walls, locked the gates and confined Jews behind barriers because we were Jews. Today, in some of the freest societies Jews have ever known, we are building the walls ourselves. We surround our synagogues with concrete barriers, place armed guards outside our schools, install reinforced doors, cameras, fences and sophisticated access-control systems, and teach our children security procedures before they are old enough to understand why they need them. The old ghetto walls were imposed upon us. The new ones are being erected by us, financed by us and expanded every year because we increasingly fear what waits outside.
Of course, there is an enormous moral difference: the security measures protecting Jewish institutions today are necessary responses to genuine threats, not instruments designed to imprison Jews. But the historical image should nevertheless disturb us. When Jewish life requires fortification simply to function normally, we should not congratulate ourselves for building better fortifications. We should ask why we remain behind the walls. For generations, Jews dreamed of escaping the ghetto. Today we are spending billions perfecting it.
And the price keeps rising. The $1.015 billion North American figure alone represents a 33 percent increase from the previous estimate of $765 million. If the underlying problem continues to worsen, what happens next? Two billion dollars? Five billion? Ten billion globally? Does every synagogue eventually become a fortress? Does every Jewish school need armed guards at every entrance? Do Jewish children simply grow accustomed to walking past security barriers before entering a classroom? At what point do we stop asking how much security we need and begin asking why maintaining Jewish life under these conditions has become our unquestioned objective?
History should have taught us something about this. Jewish communities have repeatedly invested enormous energy and resources into making exile comfortable, respectable and secure. Sometimes those arrangements lasted centuries. Eventually circumstances changed. Governments changed. Economies changed. Populations changed. Political movements changed. The seemingly permanent became temporary with astonishing speed. Jewish history is filled with communities that believed they had finally found the exception.
The State of Israel fundamentally changed that equation. For perhaps the first time in two thousand years, Jews facing hostility abroad possess something previous generations could scarcely imagine: a sovereign Jewish country waiting to receive them. Aliyah is no longer a theoretical messianic aspiration dependent upon caravans, sailing ships or the permission of foreign rulers. A Jew can board an airplane and be in Eretz Yisrael within hours.
This does not mean Israel is without danger. Israelis face terrorism, missiles and war. But there is a profound difference between defending ourselves as a sovereign people in our own land and paying endlessly for permission to remain safely Jewish somewhere else. In Israel, billions spent on defense protect the future of Jewish sovereignty. In the Diaspora, billions spent securing Jewish institutions largely protect our ability to remain in the Diaspora. One expenditure builds Jewish sovereignty. The other subsidizes Jewish vulnerability.
The Torah does not present Jewish exile as the permanent solution to Jewish vulnerability. The great prophetic vision is not that the nations will eventually provide enough police officers to guard every synagogue. It is קיבוץ גלויות—the ingathering of the exiles. “וְלָקַחְתִּי אֶתְכֶם מִן הַגּוֹיִם וְקִבַּצְתִּי אֶתְכֶם מִכָּל הָאֲרָצוֹת וְהֵבֵאתִי אֶתְכֶם אֶל אַדְמַתְכֶם”—“I will take you from among the nations, gather you from all the lands, and bring you to your own soil.” The Jewish answer to exile was ultimately never supposed to be a better exile. It was supposed to be return.
Perhaps the billion-dollar North American security bill should therefore be understood as more than a frightening statistic. Perhaps it is a message. When one region of the Diaspora alone requires more than a billion dollars annually merely for communal protection, something fundamental has changed. We can continue treating each new attack, threat and security assessment as an isolated problem requiring another grant, another guard and another camera. Or we can finally recognize the pattern.
Spend what is necessary to protect Jews today. Absolutely. Guard every synagogue that needs guarding. Protect every school. Train communities. Coordinate with law enforcement. Save lives. But simultaneously, start investing at least as seriously in bringing those Jews home. If we can spend billions making Jews safer in Galus, surely we can find billions to help Jews leave it.
And those billions would not be starting from zero. The Jewish people already possess a vast Zionist institutional infrastructure. The World Zionist Organization, KKL-JNF, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and numerous other organizations already possess personnel, offices, programs, land, expertise and substantial financial resources. Add even the billion dollars North American Jewry is already spending annually on security to those enormous existing resources, and we are no longer talking about symbolic assistance. We are talking about the financial firepower to launch an unprecedented worldwide Aliyah campaign capable of changing the demographic future of the Jewish people.
We do not need to invent the machinery from scratch. The infrastructure already exists. What is missing is a fundamental shift in priorities. Imagine what could happen if the urgency with which we raise money for guards, cameras, fences and bullet-resistant glass were applied to removing every major obstacle standing between a Jewish family and Aliyah. Housing, employment, education, professional licensing, Hebrew and absorption could become the targets of a coordinated international effort. Instead of asking frightened Jewish families to overcome all those barriers themselves, the Jewish world could make them an extraordinary offer: Come home. We will help you make it work.
And the resources need not come exclusively from the Jewish world. As I have argued previously, there are righteous nations and leaders who genuinely love the Jewish people and would consider it a privilege to help facilitate the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. There are governments, Christian communities and friends of Israel who understand the biblical and historical significance of קיבוץ גלויות and could be invited to participate financially in such an unprecedented undertaking.
And then, ironically, there is another potential source of support at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. Those who would simply prefer to see their Jews leave might also be perfectly happy to help pay for the ticket. Their motivation would obviously be reprehensible, but the destination would be exactly the same. One side might contribute because it loves the Jewish people and wants to help them come home; another might contribute because it does not want Jews living among them. We need not confuse identical actions with identical intentions.
Jewish history has seen this paradox before. Cyrus helped the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild, while other rulers expelled Jews because they wanted them gone. The moral judgment upon those actors could hardly be more different, yet Providence can employ radically different human motivations to move history toward the same destination. As Chazal teach, מגלגלין זכות על ידי זכאי וחובה על ידי חייב—merit is brought about through the meritorious and liability through the culpable. The Jewish people need not endorse the motives of everyone whose actions ultimately facilitate our return.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Geulah may make even stranger ones. If friends of Israel want to help Jews come home because they love us, let them help. If governments increasingly uncomfortable with their Jewish populations want to subsidize voluntary Aliyah because they would rather see us leave, their motives belong to their own moral accounting. Either way, the Jewish people should finally possess a serious international mechanism capable of transforming those resources into housing, employment, absorption and Aliyah.
Consider the extraordinary irony. Instead of spending ever-increasing billions protecting Jews from antisemites in foreign countries, some of those very countries could help finance the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. Combine that international support with the resources of the World Zionist Organization, KKL-JNF, the Jewish Agency, Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, and even a fraction of the enormous sums currently being spent securing Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora, and the supposed financial impossibility of mass Aliyah begins to look considerably less impossible.
We are throwing enormous amounts of money at the symptoms while refusing to confront the disease. Another camera may identify the next attacker. Another guard may stop him. Another barrier may prevent his vehicle from reaching the front door. All of those things may be necessary, and they may save lives. But none of them solves the underlying Jewish problem of exile.
Jewish history has given us enough data. Antisemitism rises, Jews reinforce their institutions, conditions temporarily stabilize, and eventually the cycle begins again. We are spending billions maintaining that cycle. How many more billions will it take before we recognize that perhaps the goal should not be making the walls of the ghetto stronger, but helping Jews walk through the gates?
Billions for guards, cameras, fences and barriers may buy us greater security. But those same resources invested in Aliyah, combined with the enormous infrastructure the Jewish people already possess and supplemented by nations willing to participate for their own reasons, could accomplish something far greater.
Instead of financing a better Galus, we could finance the end of it.
This article first appeared on Rabbi Josh Wander’s substack
