Why safe worship is a foundation for interfaith trust in Texas
By Alex Horn
Guest Column
Each fall, Jewish families build a sukkah, a temporary hut with a roof open to the sky, and invite guests inside. Sukkot commemorates the fragile shelters the Israelites lived in during their 40 years in the desert, but its deeper lesson is about hospitality. Tradition calls for ushpizin, symbolic guests welcomed into the sukkah each night, and encourages an open door for gathering and breaking bread.
As Texas heads into the 90th legislative session this January, the lesson of welcoming guests has a very practical civic application: A house of worship, like a sukkah, only works as a place of welcome if the people inside it feel safe enough to leave the door open.
That is not a small thing to ask right now. ADL’s 2025 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents nationwide, including 1,129 incidents at Jewish institutions. While the overall number of incidents decreased from the year before, physical assaults rose 4% to 203. For the first time since 2019, Jewish people were murdered in antisemitic attacks in the United States. In North Texas alone, 67 antisemitic incidents were recorded, five of which were harassment incidents at houses of worship, including bomb threats and verbal harassment. Communities are forced to weigh security concerns against their desire to gather and pray openly.
That shared vulnerability is exactly where Sukkot’s hospitality principle becomes a bridge rather than just another Jewish holiday on the calendar. This year, as the Jewish community works to deepen relationships across faith lines, safe worship zone legislation offers something rare: a policy that every faith tradition represented in Texas has a stake in.
ADL’s model safe worship zone language calls for states to enhance penalties for crimes and harassment committed in or around houses of worship, recognizing that an attack near a synagogue, church, mosque or temple is not only a personal harm but a collective assault on a community’s sense of safety and belonging.
Safe worship zone legislation is not about silencing someone’s First Amendment rights. It is about protecting them. The legislation does not infringe on anyone’s right to protest while at the same time ensuring that the right to religious freedom, which is also part of the First Amendment, is protected by ensuring the safety and security of worshippers.
This legislation is a natural entry point for the kind of interfaith coalition-building ADL Texas is prioritizing this year. While they may not agree on theology, clergy and lay leaders across denominations can certainly agree that all congregants have a right in this country to gather without fear and worship without intimidation.
Texas has already taken steps to protect marginalized groups. In 2025, Texas signed into law an ADL-supported bill applying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism to public schools and institutions of higher education, demonstrating that lawmakers are willing to act on measures that name and address rising hate.
We are asking every faith community in Texas that has ever worried about who might be watching its parking lot on a Sunday morning or a Friday night to join our interfaith coalition in calling for safe worship zone legislation in the upcoming session. You do not need to share our theology; you need only share the belief that gathering to worship should never be an act of courage. And to Texas’ newly elected officials preparing to take office after Nov. 3: We are asking you to make this a priority from day one. Introduce the legislation. Stand with the faith communities in your districts that already live with the knowledge that their sukkah, their sanctuary, may not be as safe as they deserve.
A sukkah has no locks on its door and no permanent walls. It is, by design, the least secure structure a family will build all year, and that is precisely the point: Its fragility forces an honest reckoning with how much we depend on one another.
Safe worship zone legislation does not ask communities to give up that openness. It asks the state to make that openness survivable. As Sukkot’s temporary walls come down for another year, Texas has a chance to build something sturdier in their place: a shared commitment, across every faith represented in the state, that no house of worship should have to choose between staying open and staying safe.
Alex Horn is regional director of ADL Texoma.