JTA – Rabbi Doug Alpert did not pronounce the name of the man accused of having killed Sarah Milgrim while he chaired his funeral on Tuesday.
But before reciting El Maleh Rahamim, a commemorating prayer the dead, Alpert seemed to address the alleged shooter.
“What a horrible bad service not to see her for whom she was and everything she had done to continue the peace with courage and dignity,” said Alpert.
“Because if you really wanted to know how to give the Palestinians a better life, a life of humanity and dignity, you could have asked Sarah,” he said, adding: “If you are really interested in doing something for Gaza to end the blocking and obtain a necessary help from Gaza, you could have asked Sarah. Sarah.”
Standing in front of the Milgrim’s coffin, which was draped in an Israeli flag, Alpert finished his litany with audible anger: “And if you really care, if you are more than canceling voices that made you uncomfortable, almost to cry slogans and agitate a weapon, then to leap it, why did you not ask for Sarah?”
The funeral of the Beth Torah congregation in Overland Park, Kansas, took place more than five days after Milgrim and his boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, were slaughtered. The attack took place on Wednesday evening outside the Jewish Museum capital in Washington, DC, where the victims had just attended an event organized by the American Jewish Committee which was partly focused on humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Milgrim and Lischinsky were employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Their alleged killer – a distant chicago activist – shouted “Palestine Libre” when he was arrested.
Yaron Lischinsky, on the right, and his partner Sarah Milgrim, two employees of the Israeli Embassy in the United States who were killed during a shooting in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2025, in an undated photo. (Israeli Embassy in Washington)
Milgrim had been avoided by the former friend for playing a role working for the Israeli government, several speakers said during the funeral. The speakers all said Milgrim’s commitment to Israel, and to act on his beliefs, ran deeply. They congratulated his family – Mother Nancy, Father Robert and his brother Jacob – as beloved members of the local Jewish community.
“Jacob wants him to get the phone to get the phone that day and call him, just to remind him of how much he is very proud of everything she has done,” said Rabbi Stephanie Kramer of the B’Nai Jehuda congregation, that she said that Milgrim’s parents had joined in recent years. “Bob also talked about Sarah’s commitment with a deep reverence. This is the only reason why, in the hours that followed his murder, he found the grain of doing 10 interviews – because he knew how important he was for the world to see Sarah through the eyes of his parents, how proud he was for his unshakable Zionism.
Milgrim, 26 years old when she was killed, grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, where she participated in a range of activities. Alpert – Who directs another nearby congregation, Kol Ami, where Milgrim’s parents were active – remembered that she had joined the sports teams and the children’s choir of the lyric opera and plead for animals and the environment. She marked her Bat Mitzvah in Jerusalem in 2012, an important step also celebrated in Beth Torah.
When she was in ninth year, a white supremacist targeted Jews in Kansas City, killing three people in two Jewish institutions a few kilometers from her house. When she was senior at Shawnee East Mission High School, someone painted swastikas in her school. The two events marked on her, while the Jewish institutions, she attended, adopted new security protocols and the spectrum of anti -Semitism slipped into her life.
“You know, I worry about going to my synagogue and now I have to worry about security in my school and that should not be one thing,” Milgrim said at a local information station at the time, in a clip that was widely shared in the days that followed his death.
No one mentioned these incidents during the funeral, but they appeared in a good place in the community’s response to the death of Milgrim and in the media coverage of his life. In an online rally Thursday organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, the CEO of the Federation of the City of Kansas, Jay Lewis, said that murder looked like “trauma in addition to trauma in addition to trauma.”
Lewis said Milgrim had done an internship at the Federation when he was a student at the University of Kansas, where she studied environmental studies and anthropology and was active at Hillel University, the Jewish Center campus.
After graduating, Milgrim spent time in Israel, working in a non -profit organization that uses technology to establish relations between Israelis and Palestinians, and moved to Washington to obtain two master’s degrees and pursue a career in peace and diplomacy.
She joined the embassy shortly after the Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, which launched war in Gaza. Sawsan Hasson, the Israeli Minister of Public diplomacy stationed at the DC Embassy, said that Milgrim’s dedication to the public service was illustrated for her even before Milgrim officially appeared in her role. She was waiting for her security authorization when she wrote to Hasson, her supervisor at the embassy, the day after the attack to say that she was ready to help the answer.
Once she joined the Embassy officially, said Hasson, she jumped into action, not only by adopting her role in public diplomacy, but also organizing missions in Israel, initiating collaborations with NASA and environmental groups and engaging in the advocacy of women.
“Sarah transformed her deep concern about the rise of anti -Semitism and antizionism into courageous action. And it was this hatred that took it to us on its own original soil,” said Hasson. “But know this: Sarah, your life imported. Sarah, she counted deeply and forever.
People attend a candlelit vigil at Lafayette Square in front of the White House in Washington, on May 22, 2025, for the two staff of the Israeli Embassy killed in a shooter with Capital Jewish Museum the day before. (Mandel Ngan / AFP)
It was at the Embassy that Milgrim met Lischinsky, that Alpert said that she had brought to Kansas City several times for extra time, including once on Yom Kippour. “The deep sadness of what happened is anchored not only to the extent that the relationship had arrived, but by seeing the potential that the relationship would only develop in the years to come,” he said.
Following his angry comments, apparently directed against the Milgrim killer, Alpert too, said that he thought that Milgrim’s heritage would be durable.
“I would love nothing more – we would not want anything more – at the moment than to ask Sarah, to speak to Sarah, to learn from such a lighthouse of light in the middle of a world of darkness,” he said. “We were deceived of this opportunity, and for the Milgrim family, killed much more.
“And yet, I believe that Sarah’s voice is not lost. It is our opportunity, our blessing and our obligation to keep his voice alive, to place his voice in our hearts, to follow his courageous path towards the construction of a better world. ”
