Some moments are so dramatic that you remember forever where you were, what you were doing when they took place.

Women and men of a certain generation remember, for instance, where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated, or when the Berlin Wall fell,

or on September 11, 2001. I'll always remember the Shabbat of October 27, 2018, when a gunman

burst into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, armed with a Colt AR-15

semi-automatic rifle, three Glock

357 semi-automatic pistols, and executed 11 Jews at prayer. One of the slain at the time

of her martyrdom was 97 years old. I'll always remember where I was that day, because the

next day, on October 28th, together

with colleagues at Tikva, I was getting ready to welcome over a thousand Jews to a long-planned

major conference in New York City. I was together with colleagues and friends and our families

at a Shabbat program preceding the conference when news began to spread.

You can imagine what kind of worst-case scenarios you have to think through and game out

if you're organizing an event like that in so newly, unfortunately, uncertain in an environment.

Well, that night, I got on the phone with the head of our conference security team,

and in a matter of

hours, he had additional personnel on call ready to keep us safe. These men were mostly,

recently retired and off-duty New York City police officers, men of every faith and no faith at

all, men of every race, all standing up to come by our side and make sure that a gathering of Jews

could take place in the heart of New York without fear. That was, on that very dark weekend,

a silver lining. The conference, of course, took place without any security problems whatsoever.

But back in Pittsburgh, a terrorist killed Jews in their synagogue just because he hated Jews.

His motivations were announced in advance and grotesque soliloquies in social media,

...