When the Walls Close in
Don’t want to read? Take a listen here.
As many of you know, I speak regularly at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, sharing my father’s survival story — most often with school children. I work from a script, but each presentation takes on its own shape depending on the group, the energy in the room, the rhythm of the conversation. Still, certain lines find their way into nearly every talk. One of them describes the moment everything changed for my dad: when the Nazis came to his slice of Hungary. He was hospitalized for Scarlet Fever treatment in March of 1944 when they arrived.
That phrase has been echoing in my head lately. More than usual.
I keep thinking about the 2012 shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek — and how I took my kids to a nearby Gurdwara afterward to offer our support and to acknowledge, out loud, that it could just as easily have been a Jewish building.
And then it was a Jewish building. Tree of Life. Poway. Colleyville. An AJC reception in Washington, D.C. And. And. And.
And then it was here.
Temple Israel isn’t my synagogue in the sense that I’m not there every week for Shabbat services, but it is woven into the fabric of my life and most likely yours. It is the synagogue the entire Detroit Jewish community knows. Everyone has been there. Everyone knows at least one of its clergy, its staff — people who, famously, never seem to leave. My friend Kari has been there for thirty years.
Much has already been written about what happened — accounts of that day, and our deep gratitude for law enforcement and the years of training and investment that kept people safe. I don’t need to add to that record here.
What I’m struggling with is something harder to name: the loss of psychological safety. That is what terrorism does. It doesn’t just threaten lives, it erodes the feeling that you belong somewhere, that you are allowed to exist without looking over your shoulder. We have felt this before. After October 7, 2023, we watched antisemitism surge on college campuses, hearing chants of “globalize the intifada” and other hateful rhetoric aimed at Jews. Well, they have made that rhetoric real — they have globalized the intifada, and brought it to our doorstep.
The walls feel like they’re closing in.
I get asked, often, at the Holocaust Center: Why are Jews the scapegoats? What did they do? I never have a good answer. The question itself is a kind of trap — it implies there could be a reason, that if we just found the right one, it would make sense. It never makes sense.
So what do we do?
Not long before this happened, I wrote about the importance of staying in community. I believe that now more than ever. It won’t undo what happened. It won’t answer the unanswerable questions. But it is how we hold on to each other, and how we remind ourselves — and anyone watching — that we are still here and together we have real strength and power.
That’s what I’ll be doing.
What will you be doing?
Fondly,
Kari
