For the young couple ‘to be killed in such a brutal fashion, the pain is even deeper,’ one community member said.
Sarah Milgrim was just one of those people.
She was the type of person who would go out of her way to be helpful and kind when others wouldn’t, members of her community tell National Review.
Milgrim was shot point-blank outside of the Capital Jewish Museum by a keffiyeh-wielding man who chanted “Free, free Palestine” shortly after he opened fire. Milgrim’s boyfriend Yaron Lischinsky, who planned to propose to her next week in Jerusalem, was murdered alongside her.
Police charged Ezra Rodriguez on Thursday afternoon with murder of foreign officials and first-degree murder as the sole perpetrator.
“She was a person who actually wanted to bring Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, together,” said Ezra Friedlander, CEO of the political firm the Friedlander Group. “That was her. That was her outlook in life. That was her goal. So for her to be killed in such a brutal fashion, the pain is even deeper.”
Both worked at the Israeli embassy. Milgrim, a Kansas City native and staffer in the embassy’s public diplomacy office who helped organize trips to Israel, and Lischinsky, a Christian Israeli and political researcher.
Milgrim was passionate about peace-building efforts and had two master’s degrees. The 26-year-old received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas in 2021, where she was part of KU Hillel, the university’s Jewish community. The group described Milgrim as “the definition of the best person” with a “bright spirit and passion for the Jewish community that touched everyone fortunate enough to know her.”
She “was doing what she loved, she was doing good,” Milgrim’s father Robert Milgrim said. But doing good is “what brought her life to an end.”
“Last night, she was attending an affair to figure out how to get more aid into Gaza,” Robert Milgrim said. “The night she was killed, she was trying to help the situation – that’s the irony.”
Milgrim was set to visit Lischinsky’s parents next week in Beit Zayit, a small village in Jerusalem, where friends say he was going to propose marriage. Robert Milgrim and his wife Nancy Milgrim were “worried for our daughter’s safety in Israel,” he said.
“But she was murdered three days before going.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, called the Milgrim family shortly after the attack to notify them of Sarah’s murder. It was at that time that her parents learned, from Leiter, of Lischinsky’s plans to propose.
“He looked for a good girl, the right girl. We spoke a couple of times with her,” Lischinsky’s father Daniel said. “She was very much in love with him. They were in love. One for the other.”
By all accounts, Milgrim and Lischinsky were passionate, active members of Israel’s diplomatic body. Lischinsky spoke Hebrew, Japanese, German, and English, and “moved through the world with care and thoughtfulness, as if everyone and everything he touched might break,” his friend Mariam Wahba wrote for the Free Press. The two were also people whose simple interactions left great impressions.
Friedlander, who worked with and saw Milgrim many times at embassy events, said that it may sound silly to remember something as small as the time Milgrim helped him out with travel accommodations, but it made a big difference.
“I was going to New York, and you cannot bring luggage into the Israeli embassy because of security reasons,” Friedlander said. “And I told her, ‘I want to come to this event, but I have my luggage.’ And she went out of her way, spoke to security, and said they would accommodate me.”
“I deal with so many people, so many diplomats. And she was someone who went out of her way. That helps you understand who the person was,” he said. “Sometimes a smile or a nice word, it goes a very long way in making your day. And that’s what she represented.”
Tablet writer Armin Rosen met Lischinsky randomly at the Middle East Forum’s annual policy conference, which was held just days before Lischinsky’s murder.
“I mentioned that I had only ever been to the embassy once,” Rosen said. After the two chatted for a while, about Yemen and Middle East research, Lischinsky handed Rosen a business card and told him to “get in touch if you ever want to come back.”
“The community of people who really pay close attention to this stuff is actually small,” Rosen said. “It’s a small country that doesn’t have a vast foreign policy bureaucracy in the way that we do. And I think people were able to figure out that it was [Sarah and Yaron] probably within 20 minutes of it happening.”
Washington, D.C.’s Jewish community is small — and the loss of two valuable members has rocked the couple’s circles. The two attended Jewish events regularly, Chabad Rabbi Levi Shemtov said, like the event they attended the night they were killed. Not everyone knew Milgrim and Lischinsky well or personally, but many, especially in conservative or diplomatic circles, had encountered both.
Lischinsky was “one of the most kind and pleasant people I know,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said. He “was a kind person, had a good heart,” spokesman for the Israeli embassy in China Alon Varod said. He was “genuine, humble, and just wanted to talk to people because he enjoys talking to people,” researcher Hussein Aboubakr Mansour said on social media.
Milgrim “studied for peace and worked for peace,” one of her former classmates said on social media. She was a “light and enlightened person” with a “powerful armor” of “wit, intelligence, and maturity,” her friend and an Israeli attorney Ayelet Razin Bet Or said. She was “the best” person around, her college friend Emily Conrad said.
A rally was held at the Capital Jewish Museum midday Thursday in honor of the couple. A poster for a vigil that will be held in front of the White House on Thursday evening reads: “For two of our own, who were murdered in cold blood.”