JoJo Drake Kalin was trying to keep from crying as she stood at a microphone in a tent beside her synagogue recounting the night a young couple was executed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington.
JoJo and her husband, Yoni River Kalin, had been at the museum that night almost a year ago for an event centered on humanitarian aid in Gaza when the alleged killer slipped back inside after the shooting and sat among the guests. JoJo noticed he looked distressed and went to get him a cup of ice water. She felt his sweat as their hands brushed. Yoni picked up the red-and-white kaffiyeh — a headscarf and symbol of Palestinian resistance — that the man dropped and tried to hand it back to him.
Moments later, they would watch authorities drag him away as he yelled, “Free, free Palestine.”
Now, months later, JoJo stood in front of a crowd, delivering a speech she had been asked to prepare for the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. She talked about the couple who died — how they were preparing to get engaged, how their ring came from the same D.C. jeweler that she and Yoni used.
“We got to dance at our wedding,” she said, her voice halting. “And they, they never will.”
What she didn’t say that day: She and her husband have stood by each other for more than three and a half years of marriage, but they have faced the trauma of that night in different ways, ones that have at times placed distance between them.
She has worked to deepen understanding between Jews and Palestinians amid continuing violence in the Middle East. He has responded with a mix of avoidance, anger and a sharpening of his political edges. His pink-hat wearing past as a faithful liberal and anti-Trumper has given way to qualified support for President Donald Trump, driven by his approach to Israel.
As JoJo delivered her speech, she scanned the crowd to find Yoni. He was there in a white folding chair. He kept looking down at his hands, finding it difficult to hear her recount what they experienced that night.
She tried repeatedly to catch his eye but couldn’t.
Their wedding
They sometimes go by YoJo, and their epic D.C. wedding in 2022 had 500 guests.
JoJo had Truly Madly Deeply embroidered on her wedding veil. They circled each other seven times under their chuppah, with white flowers hanging on a wedding canopy meant to welcome God, family and friends. “Their first home,” the rabbi said.
JoJo, 31, was baptized and raised Presbyterian, mostly in North Carolina. Her dad had been raised on a tobacco farm and became a doctor for the Navy. Her mother cared for the family’s six children and helped run a small private school.
Her family was liberal, and JoJo remembers being bullied in elementary school as a “Democrap.” In the conservative small town of Farmville, their yard signs for Barack Obama kept getting stolen. She adopted the local accent to fit in — “eat or be eaten,” she said.
Yoni, 31, grew up on the edge of a forested national park in the nation’s capital. His parents are entrepreneurs, his dad working in global business, his mom in documentary filmmaking. They hosted guests from Syria, Israel, Ethiopia, Australia, Germany, Bosnia and beyond, grounding him in the world’s cultures and religions and allowing his family to share their Jewish traditions.
The couple met in New York City. They had an irrepressible banter, and his great rhythm fit hers. He was a college a cappella singer who once performed for the Obamas at the White House. She put pink glitter in his beard at the Women’s March, protesting Trump the day after his first inauguration. They fell in love. She converted.
“Shalom, y’all,” she often says.
After a year of marriage, the attack by Hamas changed the tenor of their lives. “I lived in the golden age of being a Jew up until Oct. 7,” Yoni said. Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took hundreds of hostages that day in 2023. More than 71,000 Palestinians were killed in the resulting war in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
One of Yoni and JoJo’s rabbis at Adas Israel, the synagogue they share with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, described how fissures were deepened by the grievous losses.
“Tragedy simply results in exhuming and reinforcing the existing fault lines, between people, within a family, between families, within a people,” Rabbi Sarah Krinsky told her congregation. “We’re scared and we’re mad and we feel under threat, or threatening, and alienated and alone and unwelcome and sad.”
The shooting
After the D.C. attack, Yoni watched JoJo wrestle with feeling responsible for what happened.
She was a key organizer of the event. She had been inspired by an exchange at Yoni’s parents’ house, where she watched a Palestinian aid worker and a former Israeli hostage, whose husband remained in captivity, embrace and cry together.
JoJo wanted others to be uplifted too, so she helped bring young diplomats together to hear about humanitarian partnerships saving lives in Gaza. But the shooting turned a night of hope into one of loss and trauma.
Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were killed as they walked away from the museum. He was Israeli, a soccer lover and Middle East researcher at the embassy. His family saw his diplomatic side early and called him a “born ambassador.” She was from Kansas, a childhood singer and lifelong environmentalist who cared for an old goldendoodle and worked to promote peace abroad. Lischinsky was planning to propose on their upcoming trip to Israel.
Federal prosecutors have charged Elias Rodriguez with murder, terrorism and hate crimes, and he could face the death penalty if convicted. They say he put on a body camera to record himself firing his 9mm semiautomatic at Lischinsky and Milgrim and kept shooting after they collapsed and as Milgrim tried to crawl away. He has pleaded not guilty.
The night of the shooting, Yoni had planned to walk out with people exiting immediately after the event ended, including Lischinsky and Milgrim, but decided to wait while his wife wrapped up. He wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t.
“Would I have jumped on him? Would I run away? Would I be shot? I don’t know. I’ll never know,” he said. “Thank God JoJo asked me to stay.”
Weeks later when a fire alarm sounded during her dance class and the studio cleared, JoJo was engulfed by anxiety. She initially couldn’t face going back inside. “There’s something bad happening again,” her nervous system seemed to be screaming. She had a similar reaction when she saw a man arrested near a Metro stop.
Yoni remains proud to wear his chai, a Jewish pendant that symbolizes life. But after the shooting, he sometimes tucks it away. He took on a kind of hypervigilance. When he walked into Jewish spaces and Jewish events, questions rang in his head: Are there cops outside? Are there cops inside? Do those strangers belong?
He and JoJo have cried over the killings and seen therapists, separate and together.
One of the things she loved about him from the beginning was that he didn’t suppress his feelings. But in the aftermath, she saw his heart hardening. Yoni sees the violence as a direct outgrowth of a broader political and social media environment filled with misinformation about Israel and dangerous rhetoric about Jews. Following the attack, his anger swelled.
“I’m not as well-acquainted with this Yoni,” JoJo said. “And it is catching me off guard.”
Her response
One night, nearly two weeks after the attack, JoJo took an Uber to a D.C. church for a concert. Dozens of Israeli and Palestinian singers had flown to Washington as part of a tour in the U.S., but organizers were scared to promote it in the wake of the museum shooting and an antisemitic firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado. She got word of it from Yoni’s mom.
JoJo walked in after they had started. Two young women began singing a duet of “Blackbird,” the Beatles’ ballad.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
She was overcome. She stayed after to help the chorus’s staff clean up.
“She was like, ‘This is everything I need,’ and I was like ‘Okay, come have drinks with us,’” said Micah Hendler, the founder of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, who lives in the same close-knit D.C. neighborhood where Yoni grew up.
JoJo flew to Toronto in the fall to help with logistics and communications for the chorus, which the year before performed on “America’s Got Talent.” The group won a $500,000 federal grant to expand, but the promised funding evaporated when Trump dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.
JoJo felt like a protective and proud stage mom as the students readied to perform. On stage, young voices came together in harmony, and for an Arabic and English rap battle. Two of the singers faced each other.
“I need to build a world from love because it is not humane to live in constant fear of losing loved ones,” said an Israeli, a young piano player. He spoke of a pianist who hadn’t played in more than 730 days of captivity.
“I live as a stranger on my own lands,” a Palestinian responded. “I don’t even know what to say about Gaza — sieged for years, where bombing keeps stealing the lives of thousands of children.”
“It’s impossible to build a world from love,” the Palestinian added. “But you know what also is impossible? That me and you are standing here, talking to each other, listening to each other, and we’re trying to change things, we’re trying to find a different way that gives us safety and dignity and freedom to all.”
Two years had passed since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack and more than four months since the museum shooting.
“I’m just seeing what the world says is impossible happen right in front of me,” JoJo said.
On Oct. 13, 2025, following a ceasefire pushed by Trump, the last 20 living hostages were released by their Hamas captors.
Home in Washington, Yoni basked in the moment, feeling years of pressure begin to release and gratefulness for answered prayers.
His response
As they were driving through Utah last summer, Yoni listened as JoJo was describing the deep inspiration she was finding through the chorus, where she had increasingly been dedicating her time.
“I just want to …” Yoni began.
“Chime in,” she said.
“Provide a little nuance to that. So she’s taken the kind of peace-building, loving approach. I’m turning more MAGA and more conservative by the day. … I hated Trump with a passion in 2016, hated him when he reran. But I’m just becoming more and more of a fan. Does that mean I like everything he’s doing? Absolutely not. But do I think he’s in the Jews’ corner? Absolutely I do,” said Yoni, who had voted for Democrats his whole adult life.
He’s felt threatened by rising antisemitism, on the left and right, and has felt abandoned in particular by liberal friends, who “suddenly became the most adamant pro-Palestine supporters and the most adamant anti-Zionists I’ve ever seen, when they’ve never commented about Israel once in the whole time I’ve known them.”
How could it be that all the lessons he internalized about the importance of being an ally to those struggling for their rights didn’t count when it came to Jews, he wondered.
Another night, another shooting
The day the Iran war started and Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a small group of singers from the Jerusalem Youth Chorus stepped up the stairs and into JoJo and Yoni’s sunlit dining room.
They had moved into a white brick rowhouse in the city and had hoped it would be a salve and a springboard, a place to build their future and have children, which they had been thinking about more.
That day, Yoni had been glued to Fox News for hours. JoJo persuaded him to shut it off when guests arrived.
Hendler, who is also the chorus’s artistic director, had pulled together a small ensemble representing the chorus to perform at a major conference put on by J Street, a liberal Jewish group that has staked out a pro-Israel, pro-peace stance.
He needed a singer to fill in at the last minute and had asked JoJo to learn the songs. It was their last rehearsal.
They warmed up, then began singing an Israeli Palestinian love song called “In My Heart,” alternating between Hebrew and Arabic. Yoni sang along while he watched, and JoJo stepped over after they finished to kiss him.
After a horrendous season of fighting nearly 6,000 miles away, Israelis and Palestinians who were directly affected were guests in his home.
A couple hours later, in a vast ballroom at a Capitol Hill hotel, JoJo and the others did their sound check from stage. Yoni, despite his Shabbat pledge to stay away from social media, kept scrolling through X to get news from Iran. He was elated the U.S. and Israel had decapitated a regime that had vowed to destroy Israel, and he was hopeful the war would bring real change. As he sees it, Iran is the “head of the snake,” and while its people are innocent, its government has funded terrorism for decades. He did worry, though, that if things went badly, the Jews — not Israel, but the Jews — would get the blame.
JoJo saw her husband tense up at some political commentary from the stage. But she also watched him forging an easy friendship with the ensemble’s two Palestinian singers in the green room, saying he wanted to take them to a local club for Arab house music.
The mother of a 20-year-old Israeli soldier who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and a Palestinian father who was forced from his home with his pregnant wife and daughter, went on stage before the singers and spoke of finding shared humanity.
The group filed onstage in black jackets and bright T-shirts. They would be performing an anthem — “A Different Way” — members of the group wrote after the Oct. 7 attacks.
An Israeli who helped write the song described the heartbreak and emptiness of visiting a kindergarten that had been burned down in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where about a quarter of all residents were kidnapped or killed. In a quiet, steady voice, she shared an English translation of the Hebrew verse.
The most beautiful girl in kindergarten
She has the saddest eyes in kindergarten
And she stands in the ruins of her kindergarten
And she cries for those who are gone
A young Palestinian, whose best friend was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier, told those gathered, “We need more spaces where we can share our stories.”
JoJo slid her finger under her glasses, wiping a tear from her cheek. The attack outside the Jewish museum had not stopped the forces seeking something better. As the tears continued to come, another singer reached over to support her.
After glancing at Hendler, JoJo wiggled her shoulders, as if to shake it all off, to do what she was here for at this moment. To sing.
The group sang together, about the darkness before dawn, about what will be left behind, about futures intertwined, building to a final chorus.
We live within the wars
We feel each other’s pain
Because of you, I know we must choose
A different way
Crescendoing into a rousing torrent of na na na na na na, Hendler leaped up on the beat. JoJo slapped her leg, spurring some in the crowd to clap along.
Out in the audience, way in the back, Yoni stood, staring and smiling at JoJo as she sang, joyous and undeterred.
Two months later, JoJo put on a black gown and walked through another D.C. ballroom for the White House correspondents’ dinner. She complimented a former NBA player on his sequin jacket — then she heard the shots. As Trump was rushed from the dais, people hid under tables. JoJo, balled up on the floor, cried and gasped for air.
A man with a shotgun and other weapons had reached the top of a staircase leading to the ballroom before he was stopped. A guest brought JoJo water, trying to ease her panic. “This can’t be happening again,” she said.
She messaged Yoni. “Omg,” he replied. “Are you ok. Deep breaths. Count to 10.” He started tracking the news. So much they still didn’t know.
“I’m sorry I’m not there with you,” he wrote.
The post After a couple was killed at the Jewish Museum, another was left struggling appeared first on Washington Post.
