Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown tomorrow, and members of the Silver Spring Jewish Center in Montgomery County, Maryland, still do not know whether the armed volunteers who guard their synagogue can legally carry a handgun inside it. A county law signed six weeks ago bans firearms in or within 100 yards of any "place of public assembly," houses of worship included. A federal judge has had a request to block that ban sitting in front of her since a September 3 hearing, and as of this writing she has not ruled.

What Does Bill 23-26 Actually Ban?

County Executive Marc Elrich signed Expedited Bill 23-26 on July 27, 2026, and because it carried an "expedited" designation it took effect the moment he signed it. The operative line, codified at Montgomery County Code Section 57-11(a)(1), says a person "must not sell, transfer, possess, or transport" a handgun, rifle, shotgun or ammunition "in or within 100 yards of a place of public assembly." The county defines that term to sweep in schools, parks, libraries, hospitals, government buildings, polling places, protests, and, specifically, any "place of worship." The ban applies even to people who hold a valid Maryland wear-and-carry permit, and even where the property owner wants them armed.

This is not the county's first attempt at a buffer zone. A 2022 version of the same idea was enjoined and then struck down as overbroad by the Maryland Supreme Court earlier this year. Bill 23-26 is the county's rewrite, and three separate federal lawsuits now say the rewrite has the same problem.

Why Is a Synagogue Suing Over Its Own Security Team?

The Silver Spring Jewish Center is an Orthodox congregation on Arcola Avenue. According to the complaint it filed July 30 with Rabbi J. Menashe Shapiro, the synagogue organized a volunteer, armed Security Team after October 7, 2023, made up largely of former military members who are all individually licensed to carry in Maryland and who train together at least quarterly. The complaint says the need is not abstract: a visibly Jewish member of the congregation was attacked just outside the building in October 2024, and on June 9, 2026, an unknown person tried and failed to force entry into the synagogue itself.

The synagogue's reply brief, filed August 31, argues the ban forces a choice between two things Jewish law does not treat as optional: providing for the community's physical safety and relying on trained members of the congregation to do it rather than outsourcing it to hired guards the synagogue says it cannot afford. Whether or not a court weighs religious doctrine, the practical claim is simple: under Bill 23-26, the Security Team cannot lawfully be armed inside its own sanctuary.

What Did the County Just Admit in Court?

Judge Deborah K. Chasanow, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, held a combined hearing on September 3 on requests to block the law. She did not rule from the bench. Instead she sent the parties back with a question, and on September 8, two days before this article was written, the county's lawyers filed their answer.

That filing is short, and it contains an admission that undercuts the county's own case for urgency. County attorneys told the court that "in the five years since Maryland Shall Issue, Inc. initiated its lawsuit" against an earlier version of the same buffer-zone law in 2021, "there has not been either a civil or criminal citation issued" for violating the sections of the county code at issue. The county is using that fact to argue nobody needs emergency relief from a law that, in its telling, has never once been enforced. Read the other way, it is an admission that the county has spent five years defending a felony-adjacent prohibition it has never actually applied to a single person, while asking a synagogue's security volunteers to treat the theoretical risk as real enough to disarm over.

Three Lawsuits, One Judge, and a Law That's Never Been Used

Court records show the synagogue's case is not the only one. Maryland Shall Issue, Inc. and five individual members, including Julio Barreto Jr., filed suit the same day Elrich signed the bill, in a case now docketed as Barreto v. Montgomery County, No. 8:26-cv-02912-DKC. A week later, the Justice Department filed its own suit, United States v. Montgomery County, Maryland, No. 8:26-cv-03025, calling the ordinance "breathtaking in scope." All of it sits in front of Judge Chasanow, a Clinton appointee, and the Barreto and Silver Spring Jewish Center cases were argued together at the September 3 hearing.

The county did make one concession before that hearing. On August 25, State's Attorney John McCarthy agreed not to criminally prosecute anyone, plaintiffs included, while the case is pending, and the synagogue's lawyers dropped him as a defendant as a result. That leaves the possibility of a civil citation and fine on the books, still enforceable, while the criminal side sits in a truce nobody has put in writing as a permanent policy.

Why Does the County Say the Ban Should Survive?

Montgomery County's opposition brief leans on a handful of state and territorial laws from the 1870s through the 1890s, in Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma, that restricted carrying firearms in or near churches. The synagogue's reply brief calls that too late and too rare to count as the kind of Founding-era tradition the Supreme Court's Bruen decision requires, quoting a finding preserved from the Wolford v. Lopez litigation that no jurisdiction banned firearms at houses of worship "from the colonial times through the ratification of the Second Amendment." Several of the cited laws, the reply notes, came from territories the Supreme Court has already said carry little weight, and Texas's version banned public carry almost everywhere, not just at church, which Bruen itself already labeled an outlier.

The county's opposition also argues the synagogue's own interests are not "germane to its purpose," language the reply brief calls false, noting that the county's own filing concedes compliance with the ban would require the synagogue to pay for armed guards it says it cannot afford.

A Deadline the Calendar Set, Not the Court

The synagogue's reply brief makes its urgency argument in plain terms: the High Holiday season, the period Jewish tradition calls the Days of Awe, begins at sundown on September 11, and the brief cites an August 26 State Department cable, reported by JNS, directing nearly all U.S. embassies to press host governments to station security at synagogues through the holiday period, citing past attacks timed to Jewish holidays. The reply brief also points to a New York Times account of an August attack on Central Synagogue in Manhattan as evidence the danger is not hypothetical, though that report was not independently reviewed for this article. None of that guarantees Judge Chasanow rules before the holiday starts. Nothing on the public docket says she will.

What is on the docket, as of two days ago, is the county's own admission that in five years of defending this kind of ordinance, it has never once had to enforce it against anyone. Whether that fact persuades a federal judge that the law is harmless or that it was never necessary in the first place is now hers to decide, on a clock the calendar set rather than the court.

Hero photo: Ohev Sholom, The National Synagogue, Washington, D.C., an Orthodox congregation shown for illustration and not the Silver Spring Jewish Center itself. Credit: Farragutful, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.