"Sharon reportedly yelled at Peres, saying "don't worry about American pressure, we the Jewish people control America."

"The Israelis control the policy in the congress and the senate."
-- Senator Fullbright, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee: 10/07/1973 on CBS' "Face the Nation".

Jewish institutions will receive the majority of U.S. federal funds designated this year to help secure nonprofit organizations.

Of $24 million in grants nationwide, Jewish groups have been awarded $19.6 million.

In Phoenix, the only money that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded through the Urban Areas Security Initiative Non-Profit Security Grant Program - $96,305 - will go to improve security at four free-standing Jewish day schools: The King David School, Pardes Jewish Day School, Phoenix Hebrew Academy and Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School.

"In some of the schools, we're making sure that they have better video equipment; in some, it's higher fencing," said Jane Wabnik, who wrote the successful grant proposal, explaining some of the ways the money will be used to improve security.

Wabnik, who works for the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix, said the grant was initiated with "the imprimatur of Fred Zeidman and Adam Schwartz," who are respectively the federation's director of planning and CEO.

The idea was to let the federation, as an umbrella group, do the heavy lifting of writing security grant proposals for constituent agencies, which the schools are, Wabnik said. She stressed that the schools will receive the money, though, not the federation.

"I'm very pleased because they only gave 308 grants around the country," she added, pointing out that the terrorist threat level in Phoenix is not considered to be as high as in port cities, such as Long Beach, Calif., where 24 of the grants were funded.

The only other grant in Arizona was $97,475 to the Jewish Community Services Center in Tucson. The maximum amount that could be awarded in any single grant was $100,000.

There were a number of criteria used to justify the grant, which supports "target hardening" against terrorist threats, she said, including a threat assessment by local law-enforcement officials, the symbolic value of the sites and how the sites might be used by the community at large in efforts to recover from an attack.

Wabnik pointed out that schools generally have been used as gathering places and temporary shelters for people displaced by disasters.

An as-yet-unscheduled meeting among Homeland Security, federation and school officials will hammer out details of the grant's implementation, she added.

Of the 308 grants awarded through the program nationwide, 251 are being allocated to Jewish groups. Non-Jewish groups that have received funding include a variety of hospitals across the country, schools such as Northwestern University in Illinois and faith-based relief agencies such as American Muslims for Emergency and Relief in Florida.

The $24 million in total grants announced by the Department of Homeland Security last week vary in amount. The funds are used to provide everything from roadblocks to security cameras to blast-proof doors and windows at locations that could be terrorist targets.

The grants were announced a few days after representatives of the Department of Homeland Security's Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives toured the Jewish community's national security alert organization in Manhattan.

A presidential order created the center in March 2006 in response to the lack of coordination between the Federal Emergency Planning Agency and faith- and community-based groups that volunteered on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

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http://www.jewishaz.com/issues/story.mv?071005+security


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