My entire community back home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is on lockdown. I’m 5,000 miles away, sheltering from Iranian rockets in a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv. Perhaps it sounds strange to say, but I feel safer here.
At 12:59 p.m. ET, I see a text in my family group chat: Just a few miles from my childhood home, Temple Israel, the biggest synagogue in Michigan and the largest Reform congregation in North America, is under attack. A shooter has rammed his truck into the synagogue. He drove his vehicle down a hallway before he was killed during a firefight—either by a guard’s bullet or because his car caught alight.
The images start flooding my phone. I have never seen so many police cars in my life. My 11-year-old brother is home, writes my mom, but his Jewish school, Hillel Day School, is just a five-minute drive from the site, and on lockdown. So is the high school I went to, the Jewish Community Center, and all other synagogues in the metro Detroit area.
I’m calling my friends in a frenzy. They are inconsolable on the phone, and the group chats are streams of texts, anxiously trying to get hold of anyone who might know something. I hear that a girl from my class was teaching a group of preschoolers at Temple Israel at the time of the attack. I hear about how she led her kids to safety—out of the synagogue and across the road. I hear worries that police are still searching for possible accomplices in the area.