The most recent threat came Thursday, March 12 when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.

 The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.

 Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools, and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1. But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on March 12. (As of press time, the shutdown continues)

 That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.

 The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.

 According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.

 The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.

 But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.

 For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems, and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.

 Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, says Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.

 “There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters says. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”

 That role has come to an end: HIAS is shutting down its Vienna operations and laying off dozens of employees who worked there, following the Trump administration’s decision to halt the U.S. refugee program and terminate the federal grant that funded the Resettlement Support Center in Austria, which HIAS had operated for more than 25 years.

 HIAS says the move has left more than 14,000 Iranian religious minorities — including hundreds of Jews and thousands of Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Sabean Mandaeans — stranded in Iran after having already been vetted and approved for resettlement in the United States. Several hundred Eritrean and other asylum seekers in Israel have also lost their pathway to resettlement following the closure.

 “This decision leaves thousands of families in danger, with no pathway to safety,” Beth Oppenheim, HIAS’ chief executive officer, says. 

 The Trump administration has said the suspension of the refugee program is necessary because local communities lack the capacity to absorb additional arrivals, citing concerns about assimilation. In an executive order, the White House said refugee admissions should resume only if they align with U.S. national interests and do not compromise public safety, national security, or taxpayer resources.

 Oppenheim says HIAS continues to advocate for the restoration of refugee admissions and the reopening of lawful pathways for people fleeing religious persecution and continues to provide services to thousands of refugees and asylum seekers around the world.

 “For generations, the United States has stood as a beacon for those fleeing religious oppression, and we will fight to preserve that legacy,” Oppenheim says.

 The closure of the Vienna office marks the end of an institution whose history closely mirrors the modern history of Jewish displacement.

 Known then as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS began operating in Vienna in the aftermath of World War II, when Austria became a central transit country for Jewish survivors leaving displaced persons camps across Europe. During that period, the organization helped resettle roughly 150,000 Holocaust survivors to communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, South America and later Israel.

 Vienna again emerged as a refugee crossroads after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when thousands of Jews fled Soviet-backed repression and passed through Austria on their way to new homes overseas. In later decades, the city became a key waypoint for Jews leaving the Soviet Union, particularly from the late 1970s through the late 1980s.

 During that period, Vienna served as the first stop in what became known as the “Vienna-Rome pipeline,” the migration route used by more than 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union as they resettled in the United States and other countries. For U.S.-bound refugees, the Vienna office coordinated case preparation, documentation and interviews with American authorities.

 Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are among the many prominent Jews who passed through Austria on their journey from the Soviet Union to the United States.

 “If your family arrived in the postwar period, or through the Soviet Jewry movement, HIAS’ office in Vienna may have been their gateway to the United States,” Oppenheim says.

 In its modern form, HIAS’ operations in Austria became a U.S.-funded Resettlement Support Center in 2000, operating under contract with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. One of nine such centers worldwide, the Vienna-based operation focused primarily on Iranian religious minorities and vulnerable asylum seekers in Israel.

 Between 2001 and 2025, HIAS says it resettled more than 33,000 people from Iranian religious minority communities to the United States through the Austria center and its suboffices. The work was conducted under the Lautenberg Amendment, a U.S. law first enacted in 1990 to facilitate the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union and later expanded to include persecuted religious minorities from Iran.

 Since Trump paused refugee resettlement on his first day in office, no one has entered the United States through the Lautenberg program.

 The initiative comes as the ADL has increasingly turned to litigation as a tactic — the group says it has filed more lawsuits and legal complaints in the last years than in its previous 110 years combined. 

 Announced on Wednesday, Oct. 29, the ADL Legal Action Network comes out of a partnership with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in the country. In total, more than 40 firms have agreed to participate, collectively tapping a pool of 39,000 attorneys.

 The network will accept online submissions involving discrimination, intimidation, harassment, vandalism, or violence and use artificial intelligence to evaluate them. Tips that make it through the system will be referred to partner firms or the ADL’s in-house litigators. 

 “For decades, victims of antisemitism have come to ADL to receive frontline services,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt says. “We are now dramatically expanding our capabilities to support more Jewish Americans by helping to provide direct access to legal support anywhere in the country.”

 Gibson Dunn partner Orin Snyder calls the network an “unprecedented legal firewall against antisemitism, extremism, and hate.”

 The initiative comes as the ADL, which is flush with donations, retreats from some of its traditional advocacy and educational work while facing an onslaught from the right, including the cutting of longstanding ties to the FBI after the agency’s director, Kash Patel, said the ADL has been “functioning like a terrorist organization.” (The group has also faced criticism from the left.)

 The group recently eliminated an online resource known as the Glossary of Extremism and Hate, which counted more than 1,000 entries after accusations of bias by conservatives. It has also, for example, eliminated a signature anti-bias training for students and teachers that included a focus on racism and LGBTQ issues.

 Greenblatt says he is intentionally retooling the organization to prioritize countering antisemitism as American Jews report increased harassment and discrimination.  

 The legal network formalizes and expands the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line, which Gibson Dunn launched with the ADL, Hillel International, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center in 2023. The ADL says CALL has received nearly 1,000 reports from 230 campuses and helped spur civil rights complaints and criminal cases. The new system extends that model beyond higher education to workplaces, public accommodations, and allegations involving extremist organizations and individuals. 

 One example that originated with a tip is a federal complaint filed by the ADL and its partners in June alleging that a high school in the Boston suburbs failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. 

 The complaint says that Concord-Carlisle High School and Concord Middle School became hotbeds for abuse of Jewish students, including “Nazi salutes in school hallways, students dividing themselves into teams called ‘Team Auschwitz; and ‘Team
Hamas’ during athletic games, swastikas
drawn in notebooks and on school property, and the use of antisemitic slurs such as ‘kike,’ ‘dirty Jew,’ and ‘go to the gas chamber,’” according to the ADL. School administrators allegedly downplayed or dismissed students’ complaints.

 The district says it takes antisemitism seriously and that it is cooperating with officials. It also says it is consulting with Jewish groups as it reviews its classroom policies and training programs. 

 Directing the expanded network is James Pasch, who was tapped in 2023 to head a new litigation division for the organization. In an interview, Pasch says the organization is deliberately making the courthouse a central arena. 

 “ADL does and has done, historically, three things incredibly well — we educate, we advocate and we investigate — and now we litigate,” he says. The aim, he adds, is to “create life-altering costs to perpetrators who are committing illicit acts of antisemitism,” develop case law that better protects Jews, and give victims “a necessary outlet to tell their story in a complete way.”

 Pasch says the ADL’s litigation team has grown into “like a boutique litigation firm inside ADL,” with roughly seven litigators plus support staff, while most large matters proceed with support from outside law firms. The expansion comes amid skyrocketing fundraising, which topped $170 million in annual donations, according to its most recent audited financial statements — a $65 million increase over its best year. 

 Pasch says settlements, or even the threat of a filing, can lead to immediate impact and set standards for other institutions.

 The ADL’s case list since Oct. 7 ranges across campuses, K-12 districts, workplaces, and terror-finance suits. The group filed federal actions seeking to hold Iran, Syria, and North Korea responsible for allegedly supporting Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack; separate complaints invoke Title VI against universities and school districts over what the ADL calls failures to adequately respond to antisemitism. The organization has also backed a church lawsuit targeting intimidation by a white supremacist group.

 The initiative comes as many large firms reportedly recalibrate their pro bono work under pressure from the Trump administration, which has elevated antisemitism as a signature priority. To avoid becoming targets over more politically sensitive matters such as immigration and asylum, some firms are reportedly steering clear of those cases. Partnering with Jewish organizations on antisemitism claims lets the firms align with an issue the administration has endorsed.

 Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice has reorganized its civil rights division to focus on a narrow list of priorities, among them antisemitism. The department has launched probes into universities accused of mishandling last year’s protests over the war in Gaza, and last month brought charges against an alleged Palestinian militant who participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before entering the United States as an immigrant. 

 Pasch says he welcomes federal efforts but adds that increased government action is no reason for civil society to let up the legal pressure. 

 “This is a moment that will take an all-of-society approach from the government, to NGOs, to private business,” he says. “In legal cases, the Justice Department generally does not represent private individuals who are victims of antisemitism, but ADL along with our partners in firms have the ability to bring those cases to the forefront.”

 The ADL is not the only Jewish group also ratcheting up litigation. 

 The Brandeis Center, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit dedicated to advancing “civil and human rights of the Jewish people” has announced five new hires. The group is led by Kenneth Marcus, who is credited with pioneering the use of federal civil rights law — especially Title VI — to address antisemitism in education. 

 The pro-Israel group StandWithUs reports that its legal team has tripled since the Oct. 7 attacks and has been publishing semiannual reports detailing new cases.

 The increase in legal activity comes amid a broader debate about how to balance civil rights enforcement with free-speech protections. As part of settlement negotiations, the ADL has demanded that school districts and universities formally adopt what’s known as the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

 But civil liberties groups and Palestinian-rights advocates have criticized the use of Title VI complaints tied to the IHRA definition because they say aggressive enforcement can stifle political discussions about Israel. The ADL and its partners counter that the cases target conduct — harassment, threats, discrimination — not viewpoints, and that filings have already yielded concrete changes on campuses and in districts.

 In explaining how he selects what cases to pursue, Pasch says the criteria include whether a filing would disrupt harmful activity, strengthen or establish law, and give victims a full voice. 

 “We can’t heal the injured and we can’t bring people back from the dead,” he says in reference to the Oct. 7 attack and ADL’s pending litigation. “But we can provide a voice and some semblance of relief for victims, whether that be policy change or monetary relief.”

In the final political donation recorded publicly before his death, made in July, Marcus gave $1 million to the United Democracy Project, a campaign fundraising group affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC that Marcus has supported since its creation in 2022.

“The Home Depot is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved founder, Bernard Marcus,” the company he founded in 1978 said in a statement announcing Marcus’ death. “To us, he was simply ‘Bernie.’”

Over the course of his life, Marcus donated more than $2 billion to various causes, according to Forbes, and he leaves behind an estimated net worth of $11 billion that will mostly go to the Marcus Foundation.

Born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929, Marcus “never lost sight of his humble roots, using his success not for fame or fortune but to generously help others,” the company said.

Among Marcus’ legacies are the transformation of downtown Atlanta with the establishment of the Georgia Aquarium; a massive advance in autism awareness and research thanks to the Marcus Autism Center, also in Atlanta; and the founding of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, a think tank focused on governance.

Toward the end of his life, Marcus, with his wife Billi, became perhaps best known for his staunch support of Donald Trump, second only to Sheldon Adelson among conservative Jewish megadonors. Marcus helped propel Trump into the White House in 2016 by contributing $7 million and gave even more four years later to finance his failed reelection campaign. Last year, he said he intended to support Trump again in this year’s election despite the former president’s felony convictions and his “brash style.”

Marcus also defended former Trump advisor Steve Bannon against charges of abetting antisemitism and extremism. At one point, Home Depot fended off calls to boycott the company over Marcus’ politics.

Unlike Adelson, his peer in philanthropy and Republican politics, Marcus donated money in Israel while making sure to avoid taking sides in the country’s fractured parliamentary politics. In addition to the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, he gave to causes like health care, including the Marcus National Blood Services Center, established with a $25 million donation.

His philanthropy in Israel was rooted in his sense of identity. “I’m proud of the fact that I’m Jewish and what happened with the Holocaust is not going to happen again if I can do anything about it,” he said in an extensive profile published by Philanthropy Magazine in 2012.

Where some focused on threats from without, Marcus worried primarily about how the country’s own government structures were undermining its viability.

“Until Israel has a constitution and a Bill of Rights, the rule of law is murky. And I’m a great believer in the rule of law,” he said in 2012. Israel still has no constitution.

Born months before the start of the Great Depression, Marcus was raised in a tenement in Newark, New Jersey.

A teenager during World War II and its aftermath, he joined his family on trips to the Catskills where he performed magic and hypnotism. The experience of reading and satisfying an audience helped seed a dream of becoming a psychiatrist. But Marcus’ parents couldn’t afford to send him to medical school, so he became a pharmacist instead. (He also said he was rejected because of quotas limiting Jewish enrollment.)

He didn’t much care for the technical side of the field, but he took a liking to sales. That realization led him to become a retail manager, taking ever larger roles until he came to a chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles.

At age 49, after leaving the company amid corporate turmoil, Marcus joined Arthur Blank to found a new home improvement retailer with a vision that would transform the industry.

The pair picked Atlanta as their starting point, found investors and quickly opened a number of stores under the Home Depot banner. They tapped into a massive unmet demand among Americans to fix up their own homes. Unlike the old-style of hardware stores, Home Depot offered a massive warehouse space that stocked not only tools but paint and lumber, which had typically required a visit to separate retailers.

In Marcus’ 19 years as CEO, Home Depot became a ubiquitous American brand. He remained chair of the company’s board of directors until 2002 when he left to focus on giving away the wealth he had accumulated.

In 2010, Marcus signed the Giving Pledge, the initiative by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage the ultra-wealthy to give away a majority of their money to charity. Then, in 2020, he joined the Jewish Future Pledge, a promise by its signers to earmark most of their wealth to Jewish or Israel-related causes.

 He had been raised to give away his money, Marcus said in an interview, pointing to the memory of his mother who sometimes denied him a nickel for ice cream, saying the coin was going toward planting trees in Israel instead.

 Marcus took pride in his company’s record of ingraining the value of tzedakah, or charity, in his employees. “Kids come out of working at Home Depot and they all have this feeling of tzedakah. “I turned them all into Jews!” he was quoted as saying.

The largest and most notable acts of charity were not necessarily dedicated to Jewish causes. In Georgia, he was a major patron of civic institutions. In the late 1990s, Marcus and the then-governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, flew back to Atlanta from a tour of Israel. During the flight, Marcus said he wanted to give a gift to the city of Atlanta, proposing an aquarium that could anchor a redevelopment of downtown. That conversation culminated in one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world, the Georgia Aquarium, which opened in 2005 thanks in large part to a $250 million donation from Marcus.

An employee’s struggles parenting a child with autism spurred Marcus’ interest in the issue, which he championed by founding a world-leading institute, the Marcus Autism Center, and spearheading a research and advocacy group, Autism Speaks.

Also, in the realm of heath, he was a major donor to Atlanta’s Shepherd Center for spinal and brain injury rehabilitation, and the founding donor of a neuroscience institute at the Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida.

Marcus was also influential in the field of philanthropy itself, modeling a business-like mindset that always sought as large a return on a philanthropic investment as possible. His libertarian ideology and faith in the free market also drove his contributions to advocacy against government regulations.

In his final years, Marcus grew increasingly concerned about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses, which he said he thought had risen to the levels he experienced as a child and young adult prior to the founding of Israel. 

“We are very careful with our giving. And we’ve given away over $2 billion in the last several years, and in the places that we’ve given it, we follow it very carefully,” he said. “We make sure that the money is being spent the way it should be spent.”

Marcus is survived by his wife and stepson; his children from his first marriage; and grandchildren, for whom he said his 2022 book, Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself, was intended.