Outside the Capital Jewish Museum, in an area of Washington known for its courthouses, mourners did what they could on Thursday to pay their respects to the two Israeli Embassy employees who were shot and killed there the night before.
A group calling themselves “Christians and Jews Against Hate” came together, holding Israeli flags, in a sign of solidarity. Some people left handwritten notes about how sorry they were about the shooting that killed Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and his girlfriend, Sarah Milgrim, who was 26. Others, including lawmakers, left flowers.
Many left tears. Some remained defiant.
“I think these acts are meant to scare people, to frighten them away,” said James Rose, a health care consultant who drove in from a Virginia suburb, dressed in a blue shirt with the Israeli flag on the front. “And I think being present and visible is one of the best ways to push back against this type of action.”
The Greater Washington area is home to several hundred thousand Jewish people, making it one of the biggest Jewish population centers in the country. It’s a region now equally heartbroken and shaken by the killings, which the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, described as “targeted anti-Semitic violence” and an act of terror.
A day after a man with a history of pro-Palestinian activism shot the two embassy workers — a couple about to become engaged to be married — many in the community are still processing what happened. Mr. Lischinsky and Ms. Milgrim had been leaving the museum where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats.
“This could have been one of our kids,” said Rabbi Shira Stutman, the founder of the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, who came to the site with a fellow rabbi to pray.
For many young people, politically active or not, the reception at the Capital Jewish Museum Wednesday night would have been a networking opportunity — or even a chance to find a potential husband or wife, Rabbi Stutman said. Such events are popular in the Washington area among young Jewish people who want to socialize while supporting a cause.
But no one thought the night would end as it did. Not here. Not in the nation’s capital.
Ron Halber, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called the killings “a political assassination” and “the nightmare that we’ve all been afraid of.”
He said he had always told friends that he was lucky to live in the Washington area because violence against the Jewish community was uncommon there.
“We haven’t, in 50, 60 years, seen a major incident,” Mr. Halber said. “Unfortunately, that record has been broken now.”
Like so many other people in his community, he realizes that he could have been the victim of the shooting: On the same night, 150 people from his organization were attending their annual meeting, not far away.
“Look, it could have been us,” he said. “This young couple should be alive and getting ready to get engaged in Jerusalem, and now their family is going to have to bury them. This is a senseless act of violence.”
He said the museum should not be blamed because there’s a limit to how far an organization can extend its security. Should it extend to the entire perimeter of the building? Or the whole block? Already, security measures like armed guards, metal detectors and bag checks at Jewish organizations, schools and synagogues in the Washington area have become the rule.
But with the continued rise in antisemitism, Mr. Halber said, the government needs to pitch in even more funding for security.
“It costs a lot of money, and we’re not going to stop living our lives because there are people who don’t like us,” he said.
Jewish organizations in the area are still trying to figure out how to honor the couple whose lives were lost. Several expect to hold official vigils, but the grief is too raw to start planning them, some leaders of those organizations said.
For Gil Preuss, chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, the loss was unfathomable for him and his co-workers. One person at the federation went to college with Ms. Milgrim; another spent Wednesday night at the museum with her and Mr. Lischinsky, only to walk out of the building just minutes after they had.
“For a lot of people here, it’s a deeply personal attack,” he said.
Mr. Preuss said he and others have felt a tangible rise in antisemitism in the United States since the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a shooter killed 11 worshipers. With every swastika written on the wall of a school — including ones in the Washington area — or similar incidents, Jews feel less and less secure, he said, and that feeling skyrocketed after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.
So the shooting Wednesday night was met with shock, he said, but also recognition that similar events are happening “far too often in this country,” now including a place less than one mile from the U.S. Capitol.
“There is so much hate and antisemitism that people who want to cause harm can do just that,” Mr. Preuss said, adding that he was “just hoping that it doesn’t happen here, but it did.”
To help keep people and organizations safe, he said his organization has a program called J-Shield, which dispatches security experts to Jewish organizations to assess security risks. The group trains the leadership and members on what kinds of attacks are possible and how to react to them.
While Mr. Preuss expects many of the upcoming vigils in the Washington area to be inside for security reasons, there was one outside the White House on Thursday night. He said the vigil was organized by a former Israeli Embassy employee who was a friend of one of the people killed.
Mr. Preuss said he had told him to be careful out there.
About 200 people attended the vigil held at the edge of Lafayette Square, which faces the White House. An arrangement of tea lights was set up on the ground, glowing in the shape of the Star of David, near poster-size photos of Mr. Lischinsky and Ms. Milgrim, who were smiling. One onlooker held small Israeli and American flags in one hand and a sign that said “I STAND WITH ISRAEL” in the other.
After the longest day that rattled the Jewish community here, across the country and worldwide, the group ended its night by singing Hebrew songs from a list entitled, “Yaron and Sarah: May their memories be a blessing.”
And then the group broke out into one song not on the list: the Star Spangled Banner.
Darren Sands contributed reporting.
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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