(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has identified the man killed while attacking a suburban Detroit synagogue as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Lebanon 15 years ago.

Ghazali, 41, was a resident of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, according to its mayor, Mo Baydoun. Baydoun said in a statement that members of Ghazali’s family, including his niece and nephew, had recently been killed “in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon.”

Ghazali was shot by security after driving an explosives-laden truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, a heavily Jewish suburb about 20 miles north of his home.

DHS said Ghazali had entered the United States in 2011 on a visa meant for the foreign-born spouses of American citizens. He became a U.S. citizen in 2016 after applying for naturalization in 2015.

Ghazali worked at a popular restaurant in Dearborn Heights, Hamido, but had been absent in recent weeks, fellow employees told The New York Times. Coworkers and a neighbor praised him to the Detroit Free Press, with the neighbor saying she had planned to bring him flowers because his brother had died.

Law enforcement officials in Michigan said they were still investigating Ghazali’s motive. But reports on social media tied him to four people with the last name Ghazali, including a young boy and girl, who a Lebanese news outlet reported were killed on March 5 in Mashghara, Lebanon. Al Jazeera reported at the time that the family was killed in an “Israeli army raid on a house.” The raid took place three days after the Israeli army urged residents of Mashghara, a Hezbollah stronghold, to evacuate buildings used by Hezbollah.

Israel has long battled Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, in a conflict that has escalated this month after Hezbollah resumed firing on Israel after Israel and the United States attacked Iran. The Lebanese government said on Thursday that 98 children were among the nearly 700 people killed since March 2. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah strongholds, including in densely packed Beirut.

A recent poll of “connected” American Jews — those affiliated with synagogues and Jewish organizations — found that while the majority supported the war, most also believed it would increase antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.

Officials identified the perpetrator of a second incident on Thursday, a shooting at Old Dominion University in Virginia that killed a member of the ROTC army corps, as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a naturalized citizen who previously spent more than seven years in prison after being convicted of attempting to provide aid to the Islamic State terrorist group.

Authorities in Norway, meanwhile, said they had determined that two men whose behavior had ignited a major police response outside a Trondheim synagogue on Thursday posed no threat.

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On Thursday, a driver rammed his pickup truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a large Reform Temple about 25 miles from downtown Detroit. Blessedly, there were no casualties besides the shooter, whom security guards rapidly engaged. One guard was injured. Aside from that, everyone who was inside the synagogue, including 140 children attending school there, was unscathed.

“There’s hopeful news and there’s sad news about the aftermaths of these shootings,” said Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, a methodical, lyrical look at what happened to the Pittsburgh neighborhood shattered by the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that left 11 people dead.

The hopeful news is that older, established Jewish communities can rely on close, long-established bonds within and outside the community to get them through.

The sad news is that people unaffected by the shooting tend to move on and forget.

“So whereas this will haunt the Jewish community for years,” Oppenheimer told me in a phone interview, “most people outside the Jewish community will quickly move on to whatever the next horrible incident is.”

What happens next

Authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s motive, although he has been identified as a Michigan man who was born in Lebanon. But among all the unknowns, we do know a few things for certain.

We know that a great tragedy was averted due to the guards’ bravery and expertise, and due to the planning and preparation of synagogue leadership.

We know such attacks have gone from being extremely rare in the United States, to being more frequent.

And we know that what happens now, in the aftermath, matters a great deal.

That’s why, in writing about the worst mass shooting in American Jewish history, Oppenheimer spent most of his time researching what came after the atrocity.

“When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?”Oppenheimer, who teaches at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, wrote in the book’s introduction.

The power of connection

Both the Tree of Life synagogue and Temple Israel are older, deeply entrenched congregations with close ties to a number of local communities — Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

In one chapter of Squirrel Hill titled, simply, “Gentiles,” Oppenheimer chronicles how non-Jews came to the aid of the stricken congregation, including clergy, politicians and neighbors.

Emblematic of that was the capacity crowd of 2,500 people that came together at Soldiers and Sailors auditorium on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, where law enforcement, politicians and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy all spoke.

“There are usually people in government, in community organizations, in neighborhood organizations, who reach out, who want the Jews to know that they’re not alone,” said Oppenheimer.

Evidence of such connection was already on show in Michigan on Thursday. One reporter interviewed a woman praying outside the synagogue, who said, through tears, that the “Holy Spirit” had told her to turn her car around once she saw police cars racing past her to the scene, and go lend support.

In Pittsburgh, the 2018 shooting was also a time for the Jewish community itself to come together.

Squirrel Hill’s close-knit Jewish community crossed denominational divides to show support. An Orthodox rabbi organized a spreadsheet to manage the 24-hour vigils Jewish law prescribes over the bodies of the dead prior to burial.

“In Squirrel Hill, one of the nice things is there is a lot of community and solidarity across denominational lines and levels of observance,” said Oppenheimer, “and that’s pretty rare in American Judaism. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in Detroit.”

A new reality

Iin recent years, the need for solidarity and resilience in the face of such attacks has become, unfortunately, more apparent.

When Oppenheimer wrote his book, he was able to state the shooting was “a unique event” in American history. It’s true that until the Tree of Life massacre, antisemitic violence had claimed just 26 lives in U.S. history. The U.S., more than any Western country, and far more than Israel itself, had truly been a safe haven for Jews.

Since Squirrel Hill, six more people have died in four attacks. The previously well-earned sense of safety has been shattered.

“While the odds that any given Jew will be attacked remain quite low, it is obviously pretty terrifying,” said Oppenheimer.

Some critics of the national focus that fell on Squirrel Hill after the Tree of Life shooting argued that the tragedy got far more attention than similar mass shootings that had befallen non-Jewish communities.

But it’s the very rarity of these attacks that makes them so shocking and, at least for American Jews, so memorable.

In this new normal, it’s even more important for Jews to form strong, mutually supportive bonds among themselves, and with others.

And the world moves on

Those bonds are especially crucial because while the victims of violence don’t soon forget and move on, the world does.

“It’s a short burst of solidarity, and then people leave. Understandably so,” Oppenheimer said.

I suspect that even though prayers of gratitude and deliverance will echo through the sanctuaries of Detroit — and in Jewish hearts everywhere — the attack will haunt its intended victims long after the police tape comes down.

What will make the difference in how the community faces those fears and moves forward is the amount of support it receives from those outside it. If the broader Bloomfield and Detroit community refuses to forget this awful incident, it will change the course of healing.

I asked Oppenheimer what lesson he learned from the Tree of Life aftermath could apply to Temple Israel.

“In Pittsburgh, there was a long history of people showing up for each other,” he said Oppenheimer. “The relationships, or lack of relationships, that exist become more noticeable when something goes wrong.”

“Where there are strong ties before a shooting, there are strong ties afterwards.”

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(JTA) — A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, leaving Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups in limbo at a moment of heightened concern about antisemitic threats.

The most recent threat came Thursday when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.

The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.

Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1 But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on Thursday.

That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.

The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.

According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.

The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.

But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.

For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.

Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, said Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.

“There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters said. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”

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