On a dreary and drizzly Thursday morning in downtown Washington, volunteer members of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Misaskim set about the grim task of scouring the pavement near 3rd and F Streets, NW, which was dotted with half circles drawn in red-pinkish chalk marking evidence.
The Orthodox volunteers sought even the tiniest traces of blood or other remains of Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26—two Israeli embassy staffers shot and killed by a lone gunman the night before as they left an event held by the American Jewish Committee—to afford a religious burial.
After the volunteers had completed their task, both because there was nothing left to be found and because the rain had thwarted their efforts, police began to let some crews and onlookers closer to the intersection in a largely nondescript area of Washington outside the Capital Jewish Museum.
By early afternoon, the public could stand several feet from the doors to the museum. Jewish community leaders bustled in and out of the area to offer words of condolence, support and condemnation over the attack, and several civilians who arrived at the site appeared shaken, with some in tears and offering each other hugs.
“How can we stand here like it’s normal, like this is our world?” one rabbi said aloud.
A musical vigil was held at about 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, after which Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, addressed reporters.
Hamas is “a death cult that declared war on behalf of Iran,” the envoy said, calling the shooting on Wednesday night an “extension” of the terror group’s onslaught in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The ambassador, whose son was killed in 2023 while fighting in the Gaza Strip, told reporters that the gunman killed the two young people “in the name of a political agenda to eradicate the State of Israel. He described Lischinsky, who was a senior political adviser at the embassy, as “a principled human being, very unassuming, very intelligent, very accomplished.”
As he stood next to Tal Naim, the embassy spokeswoman who appeared on the verge of tears throughout the interviews, Leiter raised his voice slightly when a reporter asked if the Jewish state’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas in Gaza might have played a role in rising antisemitism leading up to the murders on Wednesday.
Israel is putting its soldiers in harm’s way to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, the envoy said. “Antisemitism is on the rise not because of Israel’s responding, but because of countries like France,” Leiter said, of French criticism of Israel’s actions and a Paris plan to recognize a Palestinian state.
He mentioned French President Emmanuel Macron by name.
“This is a contorted sense of morality. They should be ashamed of themselves, and we’re going to oppose that in the area of diplomacy as well,” he said. “What you’d like us to do, perhaps, Mr. Macron, is to roll over and play dead.”
‘All necessary security’
Morgan Brill, a senior strategist with West End Strategy, which represents the Capital Jewish Museum, told JNS that the museum’s employees are working from home and it will need a go-ahead from investigators to reopen. It will do so with “all necessary security in place,” Beatrice Gurwitz, the museum’s executive director, has stated.
JNS asked Brill if the staff’s mental states might also impact their ability to return to work. Brill began to answer before cutting herself off and offering just a troubled nod.
Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, was on the scene on Wednesday night and returned on Thursday morning, when she addressed reporters. “It broke my heart to talk to Bibi last night,” she told reporters, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He was devastated, and I assured him we were looking into this,” she said. “I also spoke to President Trump multiple times, who was just heartbroken and devastated by this.”
“This is a day where we all need to come together, no matter what religion we are,” Bondi said. She noted that Muslim leaders contacted local rabbis to offer condolences and “sent a beautiful message.”
On Thursday afternoon, six members of the Congressional Jewish Caucus—Reps. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Laura Friedman (D-Calif.) and Kim Schrier (D-Wash.)—arrived at the crime scene and placed flowers as part of a makeshift memorial scene.
Schneider told reporters that Congress members are “overwhelmed by emotions of grief” by the fact that the families of the victims, who were eagerly awaiting the engagement of the young couple, will instead be gathering to say the Kaddish mourning prayer by their graveside.
Typically among the most affable members on Capitol Hill, Schneider’s voice broke, as he choked back tears.
“We have grief. We have fear, but we’re not surprised at what happened, and we are not going to back down,” he said to reporters. “The resolve of all of us standing here, the resolve of every American Jew, the resolve of Jews around the world is that we will hold on to who we are with pride and defiance.”
‘Isn’t a partisan issue’
JNS asked the caucus members whether Democrats have proposed concrete actions to combat Jew-hatred, as the Trump administration has done, and given the latter’s concrete actions, particularly against universities. (Many parts of the Biden administration’s 2023 national strategy to counter Jew-hatred were not put into place.)
The Congress members spent the remainder of the press conference pushing back on the premise of the question that Democrats haven’t taken or proposed actions.
Fighting antisemitism “isn’t a partisan issue,” Schneider told JNS. “Democrats and Republicans need to work together to stand up against antisemitism whenever it rises, from wherever it rises, and be clear that there is no room for hate in our country.”
The Illinois Democrat noted the decade-plus of work by the bipartisan House antisemitism task force.
Wasserman Schultz, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, told JNS that Democrats supported, and Republicans opposed, an increase last year in the funding for the U.S. Department of Education’s civil-rights office, which handles allegations of Jew-hatred on campuses and at schools.
There hasn’t always been bipartisan support for increasing funding for nonprofit security grants, which help secure places like the Capital Jewish Museum, Wasserman Schultz told JNS.
“We’ve had an administration that has, for a time, refused to release funding that was already appropriated, and so making sure that we actually are fully engaged in getting resources out in these communities to keep people safe,” she said, “is critical.”
The Florida Democrat decried using Jew-hatred “as a weapon and as an excuse to discriminate against and perpetrate hate against other people and take away other people’s rights.” She told JNS that such action will “blow back on our community like it always does for Jews, because eventually we get blamed for everything.”
That view seemed to be a major point of frustration in the hours after the murders.
“We’re obviously shocked,” Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) and one of the district’s most prominent Jewish leaders, told JNS on Wednesday night, a block from the shooting and just outside the police-tape perimeter.
“We’ve never had anything like this before. Jews shot dead in the street,” Shemtov told JNS. “This is something unprecedented, and we have to process the pain, and obviously, seek resolve.”
Yuval David, an Israeli-American actor, journalist, political adviser and advocate, arrived on the scene in the hours after the murders. He met Lischinsky for the first time on Tuesday at a Middle East Forum conference.
“The conference had just ended, and we spoke about Islamist terrorism, the dangers of Islamism, and I spoke about how progressive movements are accepting the Islamist chants and supporting the Islamist cause, even though the Islamist cause is against everything that our progressive movement stands for,” David told JNS.
“One day later, this happens,” he said.
“Israelis are reeling. Jews, who are connected to our peoplehood, are reeling,” David told JNS, as blue-and-red police lights pierced the night behind him.
“Where are we supposed to be safe? We’re not safe in Israel, where Islamist groups and terrorist nations are trying to kill all Israelis and Jews, and we’re not safe here in America as Jews,” he said. “How are we supposed to feel?”
Shemtov told JNS that “the Jewish people, we persevere.”
“We don’t get shaken by challenges. We stand up. We face them. We overcome them, and hopefully, come out stronger from them,” he said.
The rabbi called for a “beefed-up security presence, where the average people in the community feel safe.”
JNS asked Shemtov if the Jewish community in and around Washington was aware of credible threats leading up to the attack. “We’ve gotten some, and law enforcement has dealt with them,” he said. “The FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department and Secret Service, depending on where the threat comes from, have been pretty good.”
But more has to be done, including increased awareness and response, according to Shemtov.
“It’s one thing when you have an off-handed comment. You have some graffiti someplace,” he said. “But now we’re talking about people who were about to be engaged next week getting shot dead in the street.”