Sarah Milgrim’s parents didn’t know that Yaron Lischinsky was planning to propose to her until after the couple was killed by a gunman in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.
Her parents had assumed that marriage was in the picture. Ms. Milgrim, who grew up in Prairie Village, Kan., had met Mr. Lischinsky shortly after joining the Israeli Embassy a year and a half ago to organize missions and visits by delegations. Mr. Lischinsky, a researcher at the embassy, had met her parents several times.
“He was incredible,” Ms. Milgrim’s father, Robert Milgrim, said in an interview. “He was very much like Sarah: passionate, extremely intelligent, dedicated to what he does, always on the cause of what’s right.”
A few months ago, Ms. Milgrim, 26, told her parents that she planned to travel with Mr. Lischinsky, 30, to meet his family in Jerusalem for the first time. What they didn’t know, and would only learn after the shooting, is that he had bought an engagement ring before the trip.
With the couple set to fly to Israel on Sunday, Ms. Milgrim’s mother, Nancy Milgrim, planned to travel on Friday to Washington from Prairie Village, a Kansas City suburb, to take care of her daughter’s dog, a goldendoodle named Andy.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Milgrim was getting ready for bed when news alerts on his cellphone appeared, describing a deadly shooting in Washington outside an event for the American Jewish Committee, where his daughter was a fellow. He immediately called the F.B.I. and the local police station, but neither could provide any information.
Nancy Milgrim opened a family locator app on her cellphone and looked for her daughter’s location. It showed her at the Capital Jewish Museum, where the shooting had taken place.
“I pretty much already knew,” Mr. Milgrim said. “I was hoping to be wrong.”
Then Nancy Milgrim’s phone rang. It was Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter. He said Ms. Milgrim and her boyfriend had died, and gave his condolences.
It was a horrific moment, Mr. Milgrim said. He pointed to rising antisemitism since Israel went to war in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“What went through my mind is, I feel the antisemitism that has surfaced since Oct. 7 and also since the election of President Trump,” Mr. Milgrim said. “It’s just an extension of my worst fears.”
It was the ambassador who told them that Mr. Lischinsky had planned to propose in Jerusalem. Mr. Leiter separately told reporters that Mr. Lischinsky had bought the ring this week and intended to propose next week.
“The ironic part is that we were worried for our daughter’s safety in Israel,” Mr. Milgrim added. “But she was murdered three days before going.”
Sarah Milgrim and Mr. Lischinsky both held Master’s degrees and were passionate about their work at the embassy, according to others who knew them. Mr. Lischinsky, originally from Germany, moved to Israel when he was 16, and had known from a young age that wanted to be a diplomat for Israel, said Prof. Nissim Otmazgin, one of his teachers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“He saw that as his calling,” said Professor Otmazgin, the dean of the university’s faculty of humanities. Mr. Lischinsky studied there from 2018 to 2021, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations and Asian studies.
Mr. Lischinsky specialized in Japanese studies and was an outstanding student, according to Professor Otmazgin. “He was an idealist,” he said. “He wanted to build bridges between Israel and other countries, especially in Asia.”
He grew up in a culturally mixed family with a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and was a practicing Christian, according to Ronen Shoval, the dean of the Argaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where Mr. Lischinsky participated in a yearlong program in classical liberal conservative thought after earning a master’s degree in government and diplomacy.
“He was a devout Christian,” Dr. Shoval said, “but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.”
Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
The post They Were Days From Getting Engaged. Then They Were Killed in D.C. appeared first on New York Times.
