Growing up Jewish, I always knew—in the way you know something without truly feeling it—that there were people in this world who hated us. People who wanted to hurt us. People who wanted to see us erased. But that hatred always lived somewhere else. In another country. In another century. In the pages of a history book.
I knew the stories of Purim, Hanukkah, and Passover—stories of a people who refused to be broken, who rose up again and again to survive. But they felt like legends, ancient and distant. I knew about the Holocaust, about the systematic slaughter of six million of our people, but even that felt somehow unreal—too enormous, too monstrous to fully absorb as something that actually happened to actual human beings. I knew about the bombings in Israel, the sirens, the shelters, the constant vigilance—but that was far away. That was over there. That couldn’t happen here.
Until today.
Recently, the hatred came to my backyard. Less than a mile away.
I was going about my regular day—working, moving through the ordinary rhythms of life—when my phone screamed with an urgent alert: active shooter at Temple Israel. Seconds later, an email from our community association: effective immediately, the community was on lockdown. The gates were sealed. We were told to shelter in place.
Shelter in place. As if those words could protect us.
My heart began to pound. My mind raced to the geography of our neighborhood—directly in the path between the synagogue and the Jewish Community Center, the shooter’s likely next target. I wanted to hide. I wanted to pull my children into a closet, hold them tight, and cry until it was over. I felt utterly unprepared, as though I had been yanked without warning into some terrible chapter of history I thought I’d only ever read about.
But there was no time to hide. No time to cry. No time to prepare. There was only now—and my children, whose eyes were wide with a terror no child should ever know, who suddenly didn’t feel safe in their own home.
No one teaches us this. No one in America prepares us for the moment history stops being history and becomes the present tense. I had nothing but instinct, love, and a handful of close friends sending messages of support to carry me through.
In the thick of the panic, my kids begged me to take down the mezuzah from our front door—afraid that if someone came running past, it would mark us. Identify us. Target us.
I stood there and felt the weight of that request in my chest.
I debated it. I wrestled with it. And then I did it—because in that moment, my only job was to give my children whatever thin, fragile sense of safety I could offer in a world that had suddenly stopped feeling safe at all.
But as I stood outside in the open air, heart hammering, hands moving quickly, something shifted inside me. I thought about the Jews in Nazi Germany who would have given anything not to wear the yellow star sewn onto their coats. I thought about the Jews of the Maccabean era, praying and studying in secret, hunted for the crime of belief. I thought about Moses’s mother, placing her baby into a basket on the river—not out of abandonment, but out of a love so desperate and fierce it looked like letting go.
We have always been here before.
We put on a Disney movie. I sat with my phone in my hand, watching the messages pour in—love, fear, solidarity—and I pulled my children close. And somewhere in those hours of waiting and holding and pretending to be calm, it hit me with full force:
This is not ancient history. This is not far away. This is my street. My home. My children’s faces.
The hatred I had always known about in the abstract—it was here. It was real. And it was happening to us.
After several agonizing hours, word came that the shooter had been taken down, thanks to the extraordinary courage of the synagogue’s security team, its staff, and the first responders who ran toward the danger. The lockdown was lifted. We were told we were “safe.”
Safe. What a complicated word that has become.
With Passover upon us, I find myself thinking about what it means that we are still here—still fighting, still surviving, still having to explain to our children why someone would want to hurt them for being who they are. More than three thousand years have passed since our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, and yet in some profound and painful way, we are still not entirely free. We are still slaves—not to Pharaoh, but to the hatred that refuses to die.
And yet.
The Jewish people have a one-hundred percent survival rate. Every empire that has tried to destroy us has crumbled. Every Haman, every Pharaoh, every force that has tried to extinguish this people has failed. We are still here. We are always still here. We rise—again and again— like a phoenix from the ashes, carrying our history in our hands and our hope in our hearts.
When my children are ready, we will rehang the mezuzah. That will be our rising.
I will not raise my children in fear—but I will always do whatever it takes to make them feel safe. We will not be slaves to hatred and antisemitism. We will fight for our freedom, even if the road is long, even if it winds through the wilderness for years. We will keep going.
And when we gather for Passover, I will look my children in the eyes and tell them the truth: the hatred is not only in ancient stories. It is not only in other countries. It is here. It has been in our backyard. It has knocked on our door.
But it will not win. It has never won.
And we—battered, frightened, fierce, and unbroken—we are still here.
STACY ABRAMS is the Director of Chapter Initiatives & Outreach for United Synagogue Youth (USY). She lives in Michigan with her family.