A Silver Spring congregation’s federal lawsuit puts a spotlight on a gun law that traces back to a ghost-gun case — and on a growing gap between how Maryland houses of worship pay for security and how they’re allowed to provide it.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The Silver Spring Jewish Center and its rabbi, Menashe Shapiro, filed a federal lawsuit this week against Montgomery County, arguing that a newly signed firearms ordinance strips their congregation of the ability to defend itself against the kind of attack it has already faced twice.
The suit, which invokes the First, Second and Fourteenth Amendments, targets Expedited Bill 23-26 — legislation that bars carrying firearms in or within 100 yards of “places of public assembly,” a category that includes schools, parks, libraries, polling places, courthouses and houses of worship. The law exempts paid security personnel from the ban. It does not exempt volunteers, including the congregation’s own armed members.
Its origin is a broader fight over ghost guns and highway carry rights that only incidentally reshaped the county’s rules for houses of worship.
The U.S. Department of Justice has also weighed in, warning the county it may sue if the law is enforced against houses of worship.
But the ordinance the synagogue is now challenging in court did not begin as a targeted response to threats against congregations. Its origin is a broader fight over ghost guns and highway carry rights that only incidentally reshaped the county’s rules for houses of worship.
A Congregation That Says It’s Already Been Targeted
According to the complaint, the Silver Spring Jewish Center organized an armed volunteer security team after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, drawing on congregants who are military veterans and hold Maryland carry permits. The team trains together regularly. The suit describes an October 2024 attack on a congregant outside the building and an attempted break-in this past June as concrete examples of the threat the congregation says it now cannot legally counter with its own trained members.
The synagogue’s counsel, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has framed the law in stark terms, arguing it prevents the congregation from defending its members against antisemitic attacks and from fulfilling religious obligations — a violation, the suit contends, of all three constitutional provisions cited.
The law exempts paid security personnel from the ban. It does not exempt volunteers, including the congregation’s own armed members.
The legal theory leans heavily on Wolford v. Lopez, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 ruling — decided 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito — that Hawaii could not bar concealed-carry permit holders from carrying on private property without the owner’s affirmative consent. The synagogue’s argument extends that logic: if a private property owner can authorize carry on its own premises, the county cannot override a congregation’s decision to let its own trained members carry on its own grounds.
The Justice Department’s involvement adds a second front. DOJ demanded written confirmation from the county that it would not enforce the law against houses of worship, warning that it would sue “without further notice” otherwise. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted publicly that people are particularly vulnerable to armed attacks during worship — a comment that echoes concerns raised on the floor of the Maryland General Assembly nearly a decade earlier, described below.
The stakes aren’t abstract for Montgomery County’s Jewish community more broadly. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 121 antisemitic incidents in the county in 2025 — roughly two-thirds of Maryland’s statewide total.
The Law’s Real Origin: A Highway Rights Case, Not a Houses-of-Worship Debate
What’s largely absent from coverage of the lawsuit is where Bill 23-26 actually came from — and it isn’t a deliberate policy choice about synagogues or churches. The Maryland Supreme Court actually upheld the county’s authority to restrict carry near houses of worship specifically. What it struck down was something else entirely.
The bill traces back to Engage Armament LLC, et al. v. Montgomery County, Maryland, litigation that began in 2021 when two businesses and eight individual challengers — most of them state handgun wear-and-carry permit holders — sued over the county’s 2021 and 2022 amendments to its firearms code, which expanded the definition of “place of public assembly,” eliminated an exception for permit holders, and separately regulated so-called “ghost guns.”
The Supreme Court of Maryland’s April 28 ruling was a split decision, not a wholesale rejection of the county’s authority. The Court upheld the county’s power to restrict carry near parks, places of worship, schools, libraries, courthouses, legislative assemblies, recreational facilities, multipurpose exhibition facilities, and polling places — all valid “places of public assembly” under state law. It struck down only the newer categories the county had added: hospitals, community health centers, long-term care facilities, childcare facilities, broadly-defined government buildings, and gatherings considered without regard to location.
The Maryland Supreme Court actually upheld the county’s authority to restrict carry near houses of worship specifically. What it struck down was something else entirely.
The provision that actually forced the county’s hand was a different one. The Court held that by eliminating the exception for state permit holders, the county had turned its ordinance into something that bans carry on public highways anywhere they pass within 100 yards of a place of public assembly — sweeping in out-of-county drivers on interstates and state roads that cut through Montgomery County, including I-495, I-270, US-29, and MD-97. Because that reaches people with no connection to the county, the Court held it wasn’t a valid “local law” under Maryland’s Home Rule Amendment — a charter county simply lacks authority to enact a law with that kind of reach, regardless of preemption.
Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7), an attorney, introduced the fix on May 12 with Councilmember Kate Stewart (D-Dist. 4) co-sponsoring. “I don’t want anyone to think that by doing this, I’m trying to reduce protections related to firearm violence — exactly the opposite,” Luedtke said at introduction.
The bill drew immediate opposition from gun-rights advocates at a June 9 public hearing — including several who had been plaintiffs in the underlying Engage Armament case. Mark Pennak, the attorney who represented the lead plaintiff before the Maryland Supreme Court, called the proposal “legally stupid” in his testimony and vowed to challenge it in court if enacted as written. One plaintiff who testified in person was Eli Shemony, identified as head of security for Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville — a different Montgomery County synagogue than the one now suing. “The transition from public street to a house of worship is a critical and dangerous moment,” Shemony told the council, arguing the congregation relies on wear-and-carry members for protection when paid guards aren’t on-site. Another speaker, permit holder Karan Singh, raised a disparate-impact argument largely absent from the current federal case: that restricting carry to only those who can afford paid security would disproportionately burden Black and Brown gun owners relative to wealthier, less diverse parts of the state.
The council adopted a fix to the ghost-gun definition on June 21 — now exempting unserialized firearms later serialized by a federally licensed dealer, closing the gap the Supreme Court had flagged — and passed the full bill around July 20. Elrich signed it July 27 at a ceremony where Montgomery County Police Special Investigations Division Director John O’Brien reported more than 600 “shooting events” and over 3,000 firearms seized in the county between 2023 and 2025. “Complying with a court order is not the same as changing our commitment to public safety,” Elrich said. Luedtke pushed back on characterizations that the bill added new restrictions: “This bill passed by the council last week does not add new prohibitions on firearms,” she said, noting it doesn’t affect law enforcement or licensed security guards carrying at places of public assembly, including houses of worship.
The fix that directly answers the Supreme Court’s highway ruling is narrow: the amended law exempts “the possession of a handgun by a person who has a permit to carry the handgun under state law while the person travels on public highways within 100 yards of a place of public assembly.” Permit holders who leave a public highway — turning into a private drive, for instance — remain subject to the restriction.
The Court held that by eliminating the exception for state permit holders, the county had turned its ordinance into something that bans carry on public highways anywhere they pass within 100 yards of a place of public assembly.
The case isn’t over. Luedtke said the amendments are meant to let the county demonstrate “corrective action has been taken” at an August 12 status conference in Engage Armament, now back before the Montgomery County Circuit Court on remand — a date that falls well within the current news cycle around the synagogue’s federal suit.
The Money Question: Who Can Afford Protection, and Who Provides It
The spending is real and rising.
Set the legal fight aside for a moment, and a second, less-litigated question emerges: what does armed protection at a Maryland house of worship actually cost, and who is currently allowed to provide it?
The spending is real and rising. Stephen Sutton, a member of Congregation Kneseth Israel’s board of governors in Annapolis, told Maryland Matters the synagogue spends roughly $90,000 a year on security — cameras, restricted-access entrances and paid personnel — and that the expense wouldn’t be sustainable without grant support. Statewide, Maryland’s Protecting Against Hate Crimes Grant Program had $10 million available this year but received more than $14 million in requests from 116 applicants; only about 84 organizations were funded. Montgomery County itself added $500,000 to its own nonprofit security grant program this year — a move made in anticipation of a rise in hate incidents after the Israel-Iran war began in March, according to Luke Hodgson, director of the county’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security — bringing the county’s total security-grant funding to $1.7 million. That money is flowing into cameras, access control and paid guards at the same time the county’s new ordinance narrows who can carry a firearm on-site.
$10 million available this year but more than $14 million in requests from 116 applicants.
That gap between “we can pay for it” and “we can’t” plays out visibly in Baltimore, where the disparity in resources produces very different security postures. New Shiloh Baptist Church uses both plainclothes and uniformed security for every service. But smaller congregations describe a thinner margin. Rev. Rodney Hudson, who leads Ames Memorial Baptist Church and Metropolitan United Methodist Church — both of which can only afford to hire one security guard — now carries a .38 special during every service after being attacked at the pulpit during a eulogy and mugged twice in his own church parking lot. “If they get past him, I’m the second guard,” he told the Baltimore Sun, describing himself, a former Army paratrooper, as the fallback layer of defense his budget can’t otherwise buy.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore doesn’t mandate a uniform security policy across its parishes, but it urges each one to prioritize safety and runs its own training program for volunteers who take on that role — hundreds of them, according to the archdiocese’s director of risk management. One example of what that looks like in practice: St. Joseph Parish in Nottingham, in Baltimore County, maintains a standing Safety and Security Ministry made up of parishioners with professional backgrounds in the military, law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels, anti-terrorism and force protection — a group that coordinates directly with the county police precinct commander.
The scale of the underlying threat helps explain why this infrastructure exists at all. The Family Research Council counted 1,384 acts of hostility — violence, theft or arson — against U.S. churches between January 2018 and December 2024, and that pace has accelerated: 415 hostile incidents in 2024 alone, up from 55 in 2020. Baltimore has not been exempt — a pastor shot an intruder at an abandoned church in Union Square in 2024, a man was fatally shot in front of Adams Chapel AME Church the same year, and a congregant was killed on the grounds of Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore in 2021.
Not the First Time Maryland Has Had This Fight
The tension between congregational self-defense and state firearms law isn’t new in Annapolis. In 2018, Del. Kathy Szeliga introduced the “Parishioner Protection Act,” which would have let congregations authorize members to carry concealed handguns on church property with written permission from the church’s governing body. Szeliga argued the vulnerability was inherent to the setting itself — worshippers with their backs to the door, their attention elsewhere.
Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler co-announced the bill, saying it grew out of requests from local pastors who had already been asking his office for active-shooter training. The bill, HB 758, was written to apply only in Harford County rather than statewide.
It never became law. The bill got a hearing on March 6, 2018, and died in the House Judiciary Committee when the session ended that April without coming to a vote. Its Senate companion, sponsored by Sen. Wayne Norman, was withdrawn after Norman died suddenly that March. Szeliga said at the time she intended to try again in a future session.
Szeliga’s name recurs elsewhere in Maryland’s gun-law history: her 2022 challenge to the state’s congressional map, Szeliga v. Lamone, is the same case whose legal reasoning is now central to the pending HB2100/SB2100 special-session fight over redistricting criteria in the state constitution.
What’s Still Unresolved
Montgomery County has not yet publicly responded to the Justice Department’s letter or to the synagogue’s lawsuit, which names County Executive Marc Elrich, Police Chief Marc Yamada and State’s Attorney John McCarthy as defendants alongside the county itself. The Silver Spring Jewish Center is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a separate legal organization — not Mark Pennak, who testified against the bill in June on behalf of Maryland Shall Issue and represented the Engage Armament plaintiffs. The two efforts are parallel, not connected: different clients, different lawyers, different legal theories, arriving at the same ordinance from different directions.
What is clear is that Bill 23-26 was drafted and passed as a court-ordered correction to a case centered on ghost guns and highway travel rights, with the council’s own sponsor emphasizing at both introduction and signing that it added no new restrictions. Eli Shemony’s testimony on behalf of Magen David Sephardic Congregation shows the security concern animating the Silver Spring suit was already raised — by a different Rockville synagogue — during the legislative process itself, months before the current lawsuit was filed. Whatever a federal court ultimately decides about the Silver Spring Jewish Center’s constitutional claims, the law is now colliding with a set of facts on the ground — rising security costs, a state grant program that can’t meet demand, and a patchwork of Maryland congregations already relying on trained volunteers precisely because paid protection is out of reach for many of them. The underlying Engage Armament case itself isn’t finished, either: it returns to Montgomery County Circuit Court for a status conference on August 12.
The law is now colliding with a set of facts on the ground — rising security costs, a state grant program that can’t meet demand, and a patchwork of Maryland congregations already relying on trained volunteers precisely because paid protection is out of reach for many of them.
Sources: This article draws on the Silver Spring Jewish Center’s federal complaint against Montgomery County; the New Civil Liberties Alliance’s July 30, 2026 press release announcing the filing; reporting on the lawsuit from the Cleveland Jewish News, The Post Millennial, and Bearing Arms; the U.S. Department of Justice’s public warning letter and statements from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon; the Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 opinion in Wolford v. Lopez; the Maryland Supreme Court’s April 28, 2026 opinion in Engage Armament LLC, et al. v. Montgomery County, Maryland; Bethesda Magazine’s reporting by Ceoli Jacoby on the bill’s introduction, June 9 public hearing, and July 27 signing, including on-the-record testimony and remarks from Councilmember Dawn Luedtke, County Executive Marc Elrich, MCPD Special Investigations Division Director John O’Brien, attorney Mark Pennak, Eli Shemony of Magen David Sephardic Congregation, and permit holders Michael McIlhargey and Karan Singh; Mark Pennak’s written council testimony on behalf of Maryland Shall Issue; Anti-Defamation League incident data for Montgomery County; Maryland Matters reporting on faith-based security spending, including remarks from Stephen Sutton of Congregation Kneseth Israel and Luke Hodgson of the Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security; the Baltimore Sun’s reporting on church security in Baltimore, including remarks from Rev. Rodney Hudson and Tom Alban of the Archdiocese of Baltimore; St. Joseph Parish’s (Fullerton/Nottingham, MD) public description of its Safety and Security Ministry; the Family Research Council’s “Hostility Against Churches” report series; and contemporaneous 2017-2018 reporting from the Baltimore Sun, WUSA9, WMAR and Patch on the Parishioner Protection Act of 2018.
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