NEW YORK — The Jewish community security coordinator, standing in a wash of colored light from the synagogue’s stained glass windows, asked the Orthodox patrol members seated in the pews about potential terrorist targets in New York City.

The attendees suggested synagogues, the subway system, Yankee Stadium and Wall Street.

“Yankee Stadium. Why is that a good target?” the instructor said.

“The amount of people. The economy,” one of the patrol members said.

The Monday session was part of a push to extend counter-terrorism training to New York City’s Shomrim neighborhood patrol groups, opening another layer of Jewish community protection amid a surge in terror threats against Diaspora Jews.

The training marks a paradigm shift for the Shomrim, who tend to focus on street crime, not terror threats. The move is significant because the Shomrim represent one of the largest Jewish security forces in the city and are a regular presence on the streets of neighborhoods with large Jewish populations.

The Shomrim are not being repurposed, but will continue their normal duties, with a layer of counter-terror training on top of their focus on crime.

The Community Security Initiative (CSI), a group that coordinates security in the New York region, ran the session for Shomrim patrols from around the city. CSI and Shomrim have collaborated in the past, but the session marked their first joint counter-terrorism training.

The groups are part of an interlocking network of Jewish security outfits in the US covering intelligence, training, on-the-ground protection, grant applications, self-defense classes and cybersecurity. The organizations collaborate with each other and with law enforcement. Monday’s training brought the Shomrim, which operate within local Orthodox communities, further into that wider network.

The event, held in the sanctuary of a Jewish center in Midwood, Brooklyn, brought in around 150 members of Shomrim patrol units from areas including Flatbush, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, south Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens. Each neighborhood’s patrol operates independently, although there is some coordination between the different areas.

CSI is planning further Shomrim counter-terror training sessions in other areas of the city, said Mitch Silber, the head of CSI and the former director of the NYPD’s intelligence analysis unit. CSI is a joint initiative by the........

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