A terror attack in Michigan shakes a mother to her core

Yesterday afternoon I got a text that made my heart stop.

“I love you so much I’m being brave.”

It came from my 11-year-old daughter, who, unbeknownst to me, was huddled in her school’s gym with, by her estimate, about 50 other kids and teachers. They were there because five miles away, a man with a rifle and a pickup truck packed with explosives had plowed into a Jewish temple which also houses a preschool. He blasted through the doors and barreled down the hallway, where his car ignited. Thankfully, the explosives failed to detonate, and the attacker died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound before he could hurt any of the 140 children and teachers who were in the building at the time. 

The attack took place at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. With 12,000-plus members, it’s the largest reform congregation in the United States and a spiritual home for many in our roughly 80,000-strong metro Detroit Jewish community. I’m not a member, but my history there stretches back decades. It’s where I attended my friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs in the Nineties, where several family members were married, where I took my kids to music classes. I made out in the lobby phone booth, for god’s (God’s?) sake! I have friends whose children were in school there yesterday.

While the situation at Temple Israel was unfolding, Jewish schools across Metro Detroit — including the one my third- and fifth-grade daughters attend — went into lockdown. My kids’ school wasn’t in session because of parent-teacher conferences, but my older daughter was in the building rehearsing for the spring musical. They had just run through a song when the head of the school came over the public address system to announce that all doors were being locked and everyone was to shelter in place. Shortly after my phone buzzed with her text, I heard the news. I wasn’t sure what to do: Race to the school? Sit tight and wait for instructions? Sob? I chose the latter two. 

While my daughter’s text was shocking, it wasn’t a surprise: For Jews in the metro Detroit area — and across the world — attacks on our schools and places of worship feel like a terrifying inevitability. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were more than 9,300 instances of antisemitism across the country in 2024, the last year for which data is available. That’s a 344 percent spike over the past five years and an 893 percent jump over the past decade, and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking such incidents 47 years ago.

Antisemitic incidents continue to rise worldwide, too. In the past week alone, there were shootings at three separate synagogues in Toronto and an explosion outside a synagogue in Belgium. The war in Gaza, spurred by Hamas’ terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, unleashed a torrent of antisemitism; in 2024, anti-Israel sentiments played a bigger role than ever, according to the ADL. The current war with Iran will almost certainly increase the likelihood of these incidents, especially on so-called soft targets like shopping centers, college campuses, synagogues, and festivals. And what’s softer than a nursery school? 

But while scary things constantly happen all over the world, for me, the impact didn’t hit home until it literally did. I say this with embarrassment, as I’m the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors who suffered unimaginably just for being Jewish. Call it naivete or my lack of personal experience with antisemitism for the first fortysomething years of my life, but even with their scars imprinted on my DNA, the threats that we live with every day floated at the edges of my reality. Not anymore.

When I finally got the green light to pick up my daughter yesterday, I drove to school with trembling hands. I knew she was physically unharmed, but I had no clue how to answer the questions she was inevitably going to ask: Why did this happen? Why do people hate Jews so much? Are we safe now? I know I can never give satisfactory answers.

Still, Jews are nothing if not resilient. We’re only 0.2 percent of the global population, but our numbers belie our strength. In the days ahead, our community, both locally and beyond, will pull together to support one another. Our non-Jewish neighbors have also stepped up: Yesterday, after children were evacuated from Temple Israel, the Arab-owned country club across the street sheltered them and provided trays of food. That is the community I grew up in. 

Pulling up to school and seeing policemen with massive guns strapped to their chests was a scene from my nightmares. The pickup line is usually chaotic, but it was eerily quiet as I threw my car in park and basically sprinted toward the door. Our head of school was there, arms open to wrap me in an embrace. I willed myself to stop crying, to put on a brave face just like my daughter did in the gym. “I held the door for other kids, Mom,” she told me later. “I helped younger kids who were crying.” As she and her friend were escorted to me, we gripped each other shakily. I’ve never given a tighter hug.

Ten hours after the incident, as I type these words, my hands are still shaking. My younger daughter, who was at a friend’s house when this all went down, had an unusually hard time going to bed. My older daughter has cried on and off but seems mostly unburdened in a way that only kids can. “Mom, that scary thing today felt like it happened a million years ago,” she told me earlier, bouncing into the room between playing outside, watching a movie and baking a cake. “But I’ll remember it forever.”

This story was updated on March 16 to reflect news from the FBI that the attacker died of a self-inflicted gunshot, not shots fired by a security guard, as had previously been reported.