Latest news with #Milgrim
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
U.S. House offers moment of silence honoring native Kansan slain in Washington
U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, leads colleagues Tuesday in a moment of silence in honor of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, who were shot and killed in May in Washington, D.C. Milgrim grew up in Johnson County, Kansas. (Kansas Reflector screen capture of U.S. House's YouTube channel) TOPEKA — Members of the Kansas congressional delegation participated in a moment of silence on the U.S. House floor to honor the memory of a couple slain in May during an apparent antisemitic attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Federal lawmakers stood in tribute for Sarah Milgrim, who grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas, and her partner, Yaron Lischinsky. Both were staff members at the Israeli embassy. They were fatally shot May 21 by a Chicago man who reportedly yelled 'free Palestine' while handcuffed and has been charged with first-degree murder. U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat who represents the community where Milgrim was raised, said the couple were 'tragically and senselessly killed in an antisemitic attack.' 'This hateful and targeted violence is not only heartbreaking, it is unacceptable,' she said. 'Antisemitism has no place in our country, and yet we are seeing a deeply disturbing rise in these acts of hate.' Davids said Milgrim was a member of Congregation B'nai Jehudah and that Milgrim and Lischinsky were committed to building understanding and connection between Israel and the United States. 'To the Jewish community in Kansas, Colorado and across the nation,' Davids said, 'please know that I am standing with you. We mourn with you. We recommit to creating a world where no one fears for their safety because of who they are.' Davids offered her thoughts Tuesday in collaboration with a group of representatives, including Kansas Republican U.S. Reps. Tracey Mann and Derek Schmidt. Milgrim was a 2017 graduate of Shawnee Mission East High School and earned a degree in 2021 from the University of Kansas. Her funeral service was May 27 at a synagogue in Overland Park, Kansas.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Shooting victim Sarah Milgrim remembered as 'a light' who fought antisemitism
Ayelet Razin says the sudden and tragic death of Sarah Milgrim has left her not only mourning her dear friend but also increasingly alarmed and angry about antisemitism. Authorities say Milgrim and her boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, were shot at about 9 p.m. as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. The alleged shooter, identified as Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old from Chicago, yelled "Free Palestine! Free Palestine!" as he was taken into custody, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith said at a news conference. Investigators believe Rodriguez acted alone. "It's not my regular response to something like this, to do media interviews," Razin said. "But if this isn't a wake-up call, I don't know what is." Milgrim helped coordinate meetings and discussions with Razin, an expert in international law and human rights, who previously served in Israel's Ministry of Justice, as she worked on Capitol Hill and in Washington to influence U.S. policies on terrorism, accountability and gender-based violence. Milgrim had worked at the Israeli embassy since November 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. The work – hearing and seeing testimony from victims of antisemitic and gender-based violence – can be traumatizing to even experienced experts, said Razin. But Milgrim "felt this is her role in all of this catastrophe that landed on us" in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Speaking to USA TODAY via Zoom from Israel, Razin called Milgrim "a light and an enlightened person," someone whose presence could instantly lift the people around her. "That was her most powerful armor: her wit, her intelligence and her maturity," Razin said. Milgrim, who held a master's degree in international affairs from American University, a master's in natural resources and sustainable development from The University for Peace and a bachelor's degree in environmental studies from the University of Kansas, told Razin she'd joined the embassy staff in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack "after feeling a rise in antisemitism around her, something she hadn't sensed before, or at least not as strongly." "The same antisemitism she decided to struggle against full-force brought her tragic end of life," Razin said. Razin said she did not know Lischinsky, but was grateful to hear that her friend was "very happy and in love." Asked how she wanted Sarah Milgrim to be remembered, Razin smiled. "She entered a room and there was a glow, a shine, and that was her strongest force," she said. "People listened to her. She's calm, she was polite, and she used those tools to set the story right, to bring facts ... She joined this team in the embassy to use her skills, her talent, not in acts of violence but in diplomacy." As for returning to Washington, D.C. now that her friend is gone, Razin said she would, but it would not feel the same ever again. "We would meet in a coffee house across from the White House," Razin said. "I can't even imagine going back without her there, but if asked to, I will because it's continuing her mission." Razin warned that more acts of violence against Jewish people and Israelis will occur if those who spread hate, antisemitism and violent rhetoric are not held fully accountable. She called the current rise in antisemitism, both in the U.S. and abroad, "a dangerous movement." "This is not a sporadic act of violence," she said, pointing to the rising number of attacks on Jewish and Israeli people worldwide. "The strong antisemitic wave is being legitimized and normalized in the name of free speech. Not enough is being done. This is not the last murder. I am sure it will inspire others to do the same." Contributing: Melina Khan, USA TODAY This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Friend says Sarah Milgrim was 'a light' who fought antisemitism
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Family of Sarah Milgrim speaks out after D.C. Jewish museum shooting
The family of Sarah Milgrim, one of the two Israeli Embassy staffers who was shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., last month, is remembering her as courageous, strong and striving for peace. Milgrim's parents, Robert and Nancy, and her older brother, Jacob, spoke to CBS News' Jonah Kaplan for their first network TV interview since the shooting about how they're processing their grief, Sarah's mission to promote peace in the Middle East and the rise in antisemitism in the United States. "Usually, a parent tries to mold their child. Sarah molded us," Robert Milgrim said. "She was a stronger person than I ever was." "I told Nancy after this happened that I'm a different person now than before this happened, from learning so much about what Sarah did and her courage and her striving for peace," he said. Wednesday marks two weeks since Milgrim and her boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, who also worked for the Israeli Embassy, were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Law enforcement officials described the attack as "targeted" and said the suspect shouted "Free Palestine" as he was being detained. He has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and other crimes. The interview with the Milgrim family airs Wednesday on "CBS Mornings" and "CBS Evening News." January 6 defendant refuses Trump's pardon Sneak peek: Where is Jermain Charlo? Baldwin grills McMahon on unallocated funds for students, schools, approved by Congress
New Statesman
30-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Israel is at war with innocence
A bystander wearing an Israel flag with a cross in the middle, prays near the Capital Jewish Museum following the shooting of two Israeli Embassy staff members. Photo by Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images How imponderable it is that people once believed history followed a moral or rational arc. Such antiquated optimism now seems obscene. Past atrocities become present pretexts; victims repeat, as perpetrators, the crimes once visited upon them. Virtue-signalling, in which social groups display their status as historical victims in order to morally overwhelm those they perceive as their oppressors, is but the sugary peacetime tip of that retributive spear. The Jews behind Benjamin Netanyahu – they are not my Jews – have, for the first time in modern Jewish history, completed the cyclical transformation into their persecutors. Pursued for millennia across continents; displaced, tortured, murdered, and then gassed and incinerated in the millions, the Jewish people are now being put in mortal danger by the current Israeli prime minister, who is presiding over the mass murder and mass starvation of the Palestinians. For every Palestinian innocent Netanyahu murders – including 16,000 dead Palestinian children so far, out of 50,000 Palestinians killed – he is passing a death sentence of revenge on innocent Jews everywhere in the world. Two of these Jewish innocents were murdered in Washington DC last week when a pro-Palestinian American travelled from Chicago and shot to death Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both employed at the Israeli Embassy. Milgrim was involved in humanitarian efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Lischinsky, half-Jewish, was a devout Christian who had grown up in Israel and possessed a deep love for the country; the two young people were about to be engaged. It is indecent to categorise them as Jewish victims, as if on the opposite side of some ledger from the Palestinian victims. They are all, Palestinian and Jew, along with the Jews murdered on October 7, part of the same casualty count: the count of the innocent. After he shot Milgrim and Lischinsky, the assassin cried 'Free Palestine!' That putative motive was sickeningly absurd, just as much as the IDF's recent killing of a Palestinian paediatrician's nine children as part of a tactic – so Netanyahu's government says about its siege of Gaza – of compelling Hamas to free the remaining hostages. The present destruction of life on both sides is no more politically effective than were the demented attacks on 7 October and Israel's dementedly disproportionate response. A child who has spent one afternoon on the playground knows more about the cyclical nature of revenge than these hardened 'warriors' do. History's twisting and twisted path is endless. Just at the moment when Israeli policy toward the Palestinians can truly be called a deliberate plan to erase them, American liberals have struggled to respond forcefully and loudly, with a unified voice, to the horror in Gaza. Such a unified response can be found on the American far left, butin a way that discredits their cause, celebrating, for example, the murders of Milgrim and Lischinsky – along with Luigi Mangione's assassination of a healthcare executive last December in New York – as heroic blows for justice. These extremists are the same people who seemed to commandeer the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia after October 7. In the city where the 9/11 attacks happened, they took down an American flag and ran up a Palestinian flag in its place. As a result of such callous gestures, as well as anti-Semitic rhetoric, the far left's efforts on behalf of the Palestinians now have the moral status of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground in the 1970s. This, tragically, includes any and every Palestinian, and every person, who non-violently protests Netanyahu's mass murder in Gaza. There are, it seems, no people any more in American politics and society. Only pretexts. American liberals, Jewish and otherwise, find themselves in disorienting straits. Their preferred news sources, in particular the New York Times and CNN, have reported on the atrocities in Gaza with unsparing honesty and depth. But there are few, or no, prominent voices characterising the slow extermination in Gaza for what it is and calling for it to be stopped. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Part of the reason for liberals' helplessness is Trump's disingenuous manoeuvring. His phoney war on American universities in the name of anti-Semitism has infuriated them. At the same time, the actual surge in anti-Semitism in America, and throughout the world, has made them mute their criticisms of what Israel is doing. So they decry anti-Semitic acts, then denounce Trump's cynical claims that he is purging the universities of the same. But just as Trump's curbing of American democracy, under the pretext of anti-Semitism, is endangering the future of liberal America, Netanyahu's war on the Palestinian people is jeopardising Jewish lives. Faced with this twisted situation, American liberals are left spinning fantasies about what they would like to see happen rather than directly speaking out against what is happening. The idea that Trump's warning off Netanyahu from striking Iran has signified a break between America and Israel is delusional. And should Trump leave Israel to its own devices, it will only signify to Netanyahu that he is free to inflict whatever agonies on the Palestinians he desires, as he is now doing. Capable of self-annulling acts of love and sacrifice, the human ego is also a suppurating agent of monstrous vanity. Having experienced terror for millennia, experiencing it once again in their very own historical sanctuary, on 7 October, a substantial number of Jews in Israel refuse to relinquish their status as victims – even as, or perhaps because, they are haunted by the trauma of being victims once again. This simultaneous return of the repressed and restoration of victim-power now provides the moral basis – the moral, ego-flattering permission for the ego to act amorally – for Israel's erasure of Gaza. Israel's policy in Gaza currently seems to reflect this notorious remark by American Air Force general Curtis Le May during the Second World War: 'There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore.' But if there were no innocent civilians, then Israeli outrage at the slaughter on October 7 would be unjustified. If there were no innocent civilians, there would be no moral purpose in recording the deaths of murdered Palestinian children. It is governments, or entities claiming to function as a government, that have the blood on their hands. It is the innocents, ordinary children, women and men, who have history wreaked on their heads by governments, for the sake of justice they never called for, and of revenge they would gladly live without. [See also: Sanction Netanyahu's cabinet ultras now] Related
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Capital Jewish Museum reopens in an ‘act of resilience'
May 29 (UPI) -- The Capital Jewish Museum reopened Thursday morning with an invitation-only tribute to the Israeli Embassy staffers who were killed outside its entrance last week. "Today's reopening is not simply a return to normal," museum president Chris Wolf told visitors, WNBW reported. "It is an act of resilience," Wolf said. "It is a declaration that we will not allow hate to silence our voices or diminish our commitment to building a better future." Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser was among those invited and who attended the reopening of the museum that is located near the intersection of 3rd Street and F Street in the capital's downtown district. "Part of my charge to my team in every difficult circumstance is that we have to get open [and] we have to get back to normal," Bowser said during the reopening event. "Thank you for getting open," she told museum officials and staff. Bowser also encouraged city residents and visitors to: "Keep showing up for the Jewish community." A 'most heinous form of anti-Semitism' Museum officials called the attack the "most heinous form of anti-Semitism" in a statement posted on the museum's website. "They are a stark and tragic reminder of the hatred that, regrettably, still exists in our world," the statement says. "In the face of such darkness, we are called upon to respond not with despair, but with resilience." The museum had closed for a week following the May 21 double homicide of Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, after they left a museum event and were waiting to cross the street outside while on foot. Both were employed by the Israeli Embassy in the nation's capital and were a couple who many said likely were about to become engaged. Lischinsky was an Israeli-German citizen and had purchased an engagement ring ahead of a trip to Jerusalem, where he planned to propose marriage. Milgrim was born in Kansas and was a U.S. citizen. A history of anti-Israel activity Chicago resident Elias Rodriguez, 31, is a U.S. citizen and is charged with two counts of murder and other related crimes after traveling from Illinois to Washington, D.C., before the shooting. He did not enter a plea during his arraignment hearing. Rodriguez has a history of involvement in far-left and pro-Palestinian events and is recorded shouting, "free, free, free Palestine," as he was being arrested, according to an FBI affidavit. He had entered the museum that Lischinsky and Milgrim had just exited immediately after the shooting, the affidavit and witnesses say. Witnesses said he yelled, "I did it for Gaza," while admitting to the attack when police arrived and arrested him. Video footage from surveillance cameras in the area shows a man who looks and was dressed the same as Rodriguez walking past a group of four people, including Lischinsky and Milgrim. The man in the video then turned to face their backs, drew a firearm and shot Lischinsky and Milgrim in their backs. Video footage shows the man reloading the firearm and shooting each victim several more times. The FBI affidavit says law enforcement recovered a 9mm pistol from the scene that records show Rodriguez purchased in Illinois in 2020 and declared in his checked baggage when he flew to the capital. Spent casings from 21 cartridges were found at the scene, suggesting the shooter used two 10-round magazines and a chambered bullet during the attack.
