The Hebrew phase "Ometz Lev" is the theme of the year at Temple Beth Hillel in Valley Village.

"It means 'courage' or 'strength of heart.' We wanted our kids to be courageous this year in their learning and in their empathy," said Rabbi Sarah Hronsky of Temple Beth Hillel and president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

As the war rages on between Israel and Hamas, Hronsky says security at her synagogues and other Jewish organizations is top of mind.

"What you want to do is have your tent walls open and bring people in and host them and serve them. It’s a really tender balance between that and having people feel secure when they are on this campus," she said.

AB 1185, recently signed into law, expands access to grants of up to $500,000 each for Jewish nonprofits and all other community groups at risk of hate-motivated violence. Assembly member Jesse Gabriel, who is Jewish and represents the San Fernando Valley, authored the bill.

"A hate crime, a hate incident, hate-motivated violence, that’s an attack against all of us, and so we’ve tried to make it clear that if you seek to attack any community that all the other communities and more importantly, the state of California will stand shoulder to shoulder in protecting those communities," Gabriel said.

The bill was a major priority for the California Legislative Jewish Caucus. In the past three years, it’s worked with the legislature to secure $140 million in funding.

"We’re talking about grants that can really help people buy new security cameras, put in new lights, reinforce gates, security guards, security training," Gabriel said.

"It allows us to use what very little resources we have in other areas to supplement whether it was a program we were doing or to afford guards to be present," Hronsky said.

She also noted that armed security guards can cost as much as $70,000 a year because synagogues and other religious institutions don’t keep normal business hours.

"A synagogue, for example, is going to have programming during the day and programming at night. We’re going to have programming on the weekends," Hronsky said. "We’re pretty much a seven-day-a-week place."

She added that the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles also provides a service called the “Community Security Initiative,” where they will come on campus and help Jewish nonprofits identify any security weaknesses.

"We take those suggestions, we take pictures of our facility and, when we write a grant, we are able to say, 'Here is a support structure for what we’re asking for,'" Hronsky said.

Sadly, Hronsky says, synagogues have had to pay attention to security for decades and antisemitism only continues to grow. The FBI reports that in 2022, Jews faced more hate crimes than any other religious group.

And when the Temple Beth Hillel Religious School recently asked how many of its teens had faced incidents of hatred against Jews, "every single one of those kids have received comments to them directly. They’ve had swastikas drawn. They’ve been called all sorts of horrific names," Hronsky said.

But in spite of all that hate, on her desk was a little hope in the form of a note from a kindergartener who said she loves religious school and wants to be a rabbi.

"The world was upside down and backwards on Sunday, and you got a kid who loves her heritage and loves her people," Hronsky smiled.

It's a reminder of what’s truly worth protecting.