A father's grief when a ‘light to the world' is put out

CNN

6 hours ago

In May, Bob Milgrim was taking one of his regular long walks with his wife Nancy in suburban Kansas City when something struck his mind.
'I said, 'Nancy, you know, our lives are perfect. We have two beautiful children, we couldn't ask for more.''
Their only small sadness was the feeling their daughter Sarah, 26, would likely not live close to their home in Prairie Village, Kansas, when she got married and they wouldn't get to babysit grandchildren as often as they would like.
Less than a week later, dreams of grandchildren were gone, and the comfort of a perfect life was shredded. On May 21, Sarah was shot dead with her boyfriend Yaron Lischinsky as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. The gunman told arriving police officers, 'I did it for Gaza,' a witness said.
The Milgrims went from musing about babies to burying their own child. From dreaming of their daughter's bright future to being left with only memories.
For Bob, there is so much to remember and admire about his only daughter.
'She was everything. She did everything,' he told CNN, reeling off a proud father's list of Sarah's achievements in sports and music, and how she had sung in a choir in European cathedrals on a tour while in high school. She also was a beekeeper and volunteered to feed injured birds of prey at a rescue center, he said.
And she had an early and enduring love for dogs. Some mornings Bob would find a young Sarah sleeping with the family pet in its crate. At other times, she would make random four-legged friends.
'She would bring stray dogs home,' he said. 'If she saw a dog without a collar, we'd have to find a home for it or locate the owner … She loved all forms of life.'
'Sarah was a light to the world from the very beginning.'
Bob was getting ready to go to bed that Wednesday night last month when his phone lit up with news alerts of a shooting in Washington, DC. At first, he wasn't concerned, but each new piece of information that came out pointed more and more to Sarah and Yaron.
The location of the attack was at the Capital Jewish Museum at F and 3rd in Northwest DC. He didn't know Sarah was there, but it was the kind of thing she might do — she often went to events after work.
Then it was reported that staffers from the Israeli embassy were involved, and that it was an event for young professionals — just the kind of people Sarah reached out to. And then that a man and a woman had been killed together.
'I knew that Sarah and Yaron were the only couple from the embassy in that age category. And so then I began to become very concerned,' Bob said.
He'd already called and texted Sarah but got no response. He called police and the FBI for information, only to be told everyone was responding to the shooting. Finally, someone asked if he could supply Sarah's passport information.
He went to his bedroom to look for the copy he had, inadvertently waking his wife, Nancy. She tracked Sarah's phone to the museum. 'We pretty much knew it was her,' Bob said.
At that moment a call from a Washington number gave the Milgrims a flash of hope that Yaron was phoning them. But it was the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, calling to tell them their daughter was dead.
They told him they already knew. But Leiter had more news. Yaron had bought an engagement ring the week before.
'We knew they were very, very serious. We knew they were in love — their bond was unbelievable,' Bob said. He also knew the couple was planning to visit Israel the following week for Sarah to meet Yaron's family. But it was a surprise to learn that Yaron planned to propose in Jerusalem.
Soon after her older brother Jacob had his bar mitzvah, Sarah told her parents she didn't want a big party for her own coming-of-age ceremony. But she did want it to be in Israel.
Her bat mitzvah two years later was also the first time Bob had been to Israel, and he saw an almost immediate change in his then-teenaged daughter. 'From that point forward, for whatever reason, we don't know, she felt more comfortable in Israel than any place else,' he said.
She spent summers and a college semester there, and volunteered for Tech2Peace, an organization that brought Israelis and Palestinians together and taught them technology skills.
Sarah helped with the sharing of cultures and finding opportunities to bond, like camping in the Negev Desert, Bob said, adding that she also traveled to the West Bank and made friends with Palestinian women there.
Sarah had experienced antisemitism at her high school, where someone once spray-painted swastikas on a building and where hateful jokes were aimed at her. As Jews, Bob said, 'we're always concerned' about the possibility of violence. When she started working at the Israeli embassy in Washington less than a month after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, she became familiar with the extensive security used there.
Bob said he and Nancy had felt it would be OK for her to travel to Israel with the boyfriend she'd met at the embassy and whom she had first mentioned to her dad by saying, 'You're going to love this guy, he's a lot like you. He's a real gentleman.'
As the relationship between the young couple became more serious, Sarah's parents tried to show him the best of Kansas City in the hopes that Yaron — who grew up in Germany and Israel — might be persuaded to stay in the US. But even though Yaron loved barbecue and Costco, Bob said they knew the couple would likely relocate to Israel.
'She loved Judaism and loved Israel,' Bob said of Sarah, his voice breaking, adding he hoped love would be her legacy.
'I want people to remember her and remember what she did and remember that she didn't hate anybody,' he said. 'She didn't hate Palestinians. She didn't hate Muslims. She loved them all, yet many people hated her … for being Jewish.'
He talked of how people Sarah had been close to had cut off contact when she began working at the embassy, how they would even post hateful messages and how none of them offered condolences to him after her death.
'The people that hated her never stopped to ask her, how did she feel? And they never asked her, what is your viewpoint on how things in the Middle East should be settled? They just assumed that she was bad,' he said.
A few weeks before his own family tragedy, Bob said he and Nancy were on one of the first flights into Reagan National Airport in Washington after it reopened following a military helicopter and passenger plane crash nearby that killed 67.
'I realized (dozens) of people had lost their lives and (I was) thinking about all the families and the horrific grief that they were going through. And I became emotional. And little did I know that a few months later I'd be going through the same thing.'
Earlier this month, Bob and Nancy traveled to Washington, DC, to clean out Sarah's home. They had helped her to move in, and Bob remembered her excitement that day as she looked forward to all that was ahead, a future now unfulfilled.
'We were the first people to go into her apartment since the murder,' he said. 'It was like a freeze frame in time — the cup of coffee, half drunk, was on the counter. There was a little bit of coffee left in the coffee pot … it was one of the hardest, one of the most difficult days of my life, or Nancy's life.'
They had also hoped to meet Yaron's siblings in Washington at a Kennedy Center performance by the US-Israel Opera Initiative that was dedicated to the slain couple. But the outside world intruded again when airports were closed in the Iran-Israel conflict and the Lischinsky family could not travel.
One of Bob Milgrim's favorite memories is from a time in Sarah's childhood when she looked to him as a teacher. They were walking outside one morning when Sarah wondered aloud why the sidewalk was dry but the grass was wet even though it hadn't been raining.
'I had to explain dew to her, and she goes, 'Dad, you know everything!'' he remembered with a chuckle.
After she was killed, Bob marveled at how much Sarah had taught him, too.
'I've learned how to be good and how to respect other people and how important it is for there to be love in the world and to see good in the world. And that's what Sarah saw,' he said. 'And since her tragic death, I've seen much more of it. I've seen much more good, and bad.
'Of course, the bad was horrific, and it could not have been any worse. But the outpouring of love, both from the Jewish community and all communities around the world is what's keeping us going right now. And it's been unbelievable.'
Sarah has been laid to rest in Kansas City. Bob and Nancy have taken the pictures off the walls in Sarah's apartment, and the magnets off her refrigerator. They've kept some of her things and donated the rest. Now, Bob echoes the traditional Jewish message to the bereaved: zichronam l'vracha, or 'May their memory be a blessing.'
'Her memory is wonderful,' he said. 'And we need to have the courage to make it a blessing, so the world would be a better place.'
Sarah's beloved goldendoodle Andy is now with her parents in Kansas. The dog was the first thing Bob thought of when a victim's assistance officer asked if he needed help with anything.
'We told them the dog was locked up somewhere,' Bob said. 'The agent said, 'We'll take care of getting Andy back to Kansas City somehow.'' The dog was found at Yaron's apartment in Washington and flown to Kansas by that evening.
But for the Milgrims, the hole Sarah left is huge.
'The void of her personality and the aura of her being around us cannot be replaced. There's nothing that could fill that hole,' Bob said. 'The three of us, Nancy and Jacob and I, will do our best.'
This story was reported by CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Meridith Edwards in Washington, DC, and written by CNN's Rachel Clarke in Atlanta.