Almost a year ago, a gunman killed two Israeli embassy employees as they left an American Jewish Committee reception at the Capital Jewish Museum, located about a mile east of the White House, on May 21, 2025.
On Wednesday, the museum was one of 11 organizations, nine of them Jewish, that shared $120,000 in funding from the District of Columbia.
The monies came from the district’s program to fund safety improvements to nonprofit organizations in the nation’s capital, and the announcement came near the first anniversary of the killings.
Elias Rodriguez faces more than a dozen charges, many terror related, in the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. The two victims planned to marry.
“It was in our backyard and happened on the street,” Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, told JNS.
The gunman “just wanted to kill two Jews, and that I think shocked a lot of people in Washington,” he said. (JNS sought comment from the museum.)
Halber told JNS that it was much quicker to get financial support from the local government than from Congress.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill on April 30 funding most of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ending a 76-day partial shutdown. Before then, the grant money was frozen.
Democrats and Republicans have blamed one another for the shutdown. The GOP controls both houses of Congress.
“When the war broke out with Iran, we reached out to the mayor’s office and said, ‘Since we’re going to be entering into a period of increased tension, there’s a greater likelihood that there could be an incident,’” Halber told JNS.
“What made it easy—and this is a key point—what made it easy for the D.C. government to do this is that they already had an existing standing program and had already had previous contracts in place with these institutions,” he said. “It was simply a matter of adding money to the contract.”
Unlike the federal funds, which can only be spent on capital improvements such as physical barriers or stronger doors, Halber told JNS that the D.C. program can be used to hire security guards.
The grant recipients included six synagogues, the local Jewish community center, a Jewish day school and the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington.
“People should feel safe wherever they gather in the district, whether at places of worship, community spaces or neighborhood institutions,” stated Muriel Bowser, the district mayor.
“We know that global events can have a local impact, and we are hearing directly from our partners about the need for additional support,” the mayor said. “We’re staying committed to ensuring organizations have the resources they need to continue their work safely.”
