Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker reflects on his son narrowly escaping a shooting at Brown University, while also grappling with an attack in Australia.<\/p>\n
ST PAUL, Minn. \u2014 As Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker prepares to light the first candle of Hanukkah, he\u2019s also reflecting on a pair of tragedies that touched both his family and his community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Saturday night, the senior rabbi of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul was at home with his wife when they received a text from their son, Eiden, a 29-year-old Brown University<\/a> graduate now working at the university as a \u201cmaker in residence\u201d in the Brown Design Workshop.<\/p>\n \u201cThe workshop shares space in the engineering building. It’s right next to it, so the hallway connects to where the auditorium was and the bathroom. And he was about to go to that bathroom,\u201d recounted the rabbi about how his son was mere feet \u2013 and moments \u2013 away from where the shooter started firing at students in a bathroom before moving onto the building’s auditorium.<\/p>\n Once Eiden realized what was happening, his father said he then helped lead others to safety.<\/p>\n \u201cHe and some others helped get some of the students out of the ground design space onto the street. Then the police said you need to run, get into spaces, shelter in place, and they got into safety,\u201d Rabbi Spilker said, noting that Eiden now recalls those moments as \u201ca blur.\u201d<\/p>\n And while the Brown graduate himself continues processing what happened, so does his father struggle to accept the close call involving one of his three children.<\/p>\n \u201cThank God you’re OK. And my heart breaks for the victims, which it does. But then I started realizing \u2013 my body started realizing, as it started shaking \u2013 like, oh my gosh, this is where, but for the grace of God, Eiden could have been there,\u201d Spilker shared.<\/p>\n