In Jerusalem’s center, an elite emergency team prepares for an intense, lonely fight
One of 1,000 volunteer units set up after Oct. 7, Jerusalem Shield trains with expensive gear for extreme situations
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Last summer, David Roytman felt that his upscale neighborhood in central Jerusalem was one of the safest places in the country, if not the world.
Now, an armed Roytman patrols its streets regularly with 20 other volunteers from the emergency team he had established, as they use equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for wartime scenarios that mere months ago would have struck them as the laughable fantasies of an overactive imagination.
Like millions of Israelis across the country, the Hamas onslaught of October 7 radically undermined Rotyman’s feeling of personal security. He is now one of the thousands of men and women who either started or joined emergency teams — kitot konenut in Hebrew – to defend their immediate communities.
Israel has two main types of emergency teams: Police-run ones like Roytman’s, which are comprised of volunteers, and army-run units whose members serve in them as part of their military reserve duty.
The army-run units, which number around 400 mainly in border-adjacent and at-risk communities, have been beefed up and retrained following failures exposed on October 7 in how the military has managed and armed those units.
The police-run ones, meanwhile, have multiplied more than tenfold, to about 1,000 today from 66 on October 7, when approximately 3,000 Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis near the border with Gaza and abducted another 251.
Informed by the October 7 onslaught, in which terrorists easily overwhelmed multiple emergency teams despite their fighters’ heroic resistance, the members of Roytman’s emergency team, named Jerusalem Shield, train under the assumption that they would need to fend off well-armed terrorists for hours without external assistance.
The assumption is reflected in the gear at Jerusalem Shield’s disposal, which sets it apart from other units. Roytman, a Ukraine-born businessman who divides his time between Jerusalem and New York, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Jewish contacts to buy Jerusalem Shield equipment.
“I set up this unit so that if something happens, I will know I did my part to defend this piece of the country so that we will never be caught off-guard again,” Roytman told The Times of Israel.
A special forces armory in central Jerusalem
The unit’s headquarters, situated on the basement floor of an office building near Echad Ha’am Street, looks like the armory of a special forces unit, boasting such gadgets as CornerShot, a device that costs thousands of dollars and allows users to shoot around street corners without exposing themselves, several drones, Kevlar bulletproof vests and first-rate, branded tactical uniforms.
The branding and fundraising come naturally to Roytman, 45, who had served in the IDF as a sharpshooter in the elite Duvdevan unit and owns several businesses, including a factory that makes luxury kippot. On trips to the United States, he lobbies donors to equip his boutique emergency team, which he regularly films and documents in action.
Donations, however, can’t buy his unit weapons, which are tightly regulated in Israel (even after the relaxing of gun ownership criteria following October 7, rifles are rarely accessible to civilians, who can typically own only a single handgun pending a relatively long and thorough screening process).
For firepower, the unit relies on the personal sidearms of its volunteers and a handful of police-issued M-16 rifles – an amenity that some police-run emergency teams enjoy after October 7 as part of the controversial gun-friendly policy led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Most emergency teams have little more than the weapons, and in some cases not even that. But Roytman is working on adding an army-trained dog and a dedicated pickup truck to the arsenal of his unit, whose volunteers hold weekly trainings that include a patrol.
The police’s decision to include Jerusalem Shield in its list of emergency teams eligible for rifles significantly upgraded its defensive capabilities, Yoni Cutler, a volunteer of the team, said.
“Anyone who’s ever been in combat knows the dramatic difference in capabilities between a handgun and a rifle. So now we can actually mount something of an effective defense,” Cutler said.
What to do about the families?
Being a volunteer unit made up of mostly family men presents additional challenges.
“We need to decide what to do about the families,” Rotyman told the volunteers at a recent training session. The decision they debated was whether to gather the families of the team members at the unit’s headquarters or to leave the families at home as the volunteers went out to defend the area.
“With all the goodwill in the world, if there are terrorists in the neighborhood I’m not leaving my family alone,” one member, a reservist in his 30s, said. “But the logistics of moving 20 families in the middle of an onslaught isn’t practical,” another argued.
The debate “would have sounded ridiculous before October 7,” Roytman later told The Times of Israel. But after the onslaught, “a scenario of thousands of terrorists raiding the city center isn’t very difficult to imagine,” he said.
Cutler, the volunteer, said that his understanding of the area’s security situation was formed during the Second Intifada.
“There were suicide bombs, shootings, stabbings, you name it. It can return immediately,” said Cutler, a tour guide from Moshav Beit Zait near Jerusalem.
Cutler, 53, who had immigrated to Israel, or made aliyah, many years ago from the United States, joined Jerusalem Sield because his moshav’s emergency team was already established and did not lack for volunteers, he said. Reflecting the neighborhood’s diversity, the emergency team comprises olim from France, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and beyond.
Back at headquarters, Roytman delegated volunteers to set up a pool table that he received for the headquarters as a donation. A bar will be installed for off-duty volunteers and Rotyman asked team members to sign up for moving and installing it.
Seen a certain way, Jerusalem Shield, which has only male volunteers, can appear to be a club for boys to hang out and play with their toys. But the furnishings and gadgets serve an operational purpose, Roytman said.
“Long-term, building a unit like this requires people to like volunteering in it,” Roytman said.
“The shock and alarm of October 7, however profound, will wear off. When it does, the quality of the unit will determine if it remains ready for an attack that, at the end of the day, we now know is much more likely than we liked to think,” he said.
