Years ago, an Israeli diplomat told me about a focus group he’d run in which participants were asked, If Israel were a house, what kind of house would it be? Their answer, he said, was that Israel was a bunker. An uninviting concrete structure with sharp steel protuberances meant to keep people out. A house where security was valued over comfort.
I thought of that imagined house often when I spent the year in Berlin in 2017. On occasional Friday nights, I’d make the trip into Prenzlauer Berg for Kabbalat Shabbat at the Rykestrasse Synagogue. I was rarely unaware of what had transpired just 70 years earlier on the streets I was walking. And yet the place I felt least secure was in that shul, where entry required presenting my passport, running my belongings through an X-ray machine and being wanded by a burly security guard.
That Berlin beit knesset — the Hebrew term for synagogue that literally means “house of gathering” — had itself become a steel-studded, concrete bunker designed to prevent “bad actors” from entering.
I thought sadly of the focus group again when I learned that Israeli Embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were gunned down on May 21 in front of a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. That unbearable news has been followed by statements of sorrow and of security from American Jewish organizations. Their messages focused on our communal grief, as well as on the need to remain vigilant, to report anything suspicious and, where possible, to extend security perimeters.
Many of us already walk past armed security guards to get into shul, school, work. Sarah and Yaron certainly had to pass through security to enter the Capital Jewish Museum. How much further out should we extend our perimeters? How much more secure can we make ourselves? What would that require of us? Should we turn our communal sites into bunkers?
My sorrow at the tragic deaths of this beautiful young couple is matched by my sorrow about what it might, perhaps must, mean for Jews in the United States: that our physical institutions will increasingly become bunkers.
As podcaster and actor Jonah Platt said as a guest on “Unholy: Two Jews on the News,” “Hopefully this is a good wake-up call for all Jewish institutions everywhere at every level to really tighten the screws, if they haven’t already, on security protocols.”
But if all this is the answer to a growing threat, what, then, is the answer to all this?
The answer is not to hide behind these walls, but to use their protection to double down on what we do inside them: teach more and learn more, pray more and celebrate more, and, much as Sarah and Yaron were doing in the museum right before they were senselessly killed, work more and harder to make the world a better, safer, more peaceful place — for ourselves and for our children.
May the memories of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky be a blessing.