West Bloomfield, Mich. – Two months ago, in a classroom painted orange and blue, Elise Otis had already put the babies down for a nap when she heard a loud bang. She rushed to the hall and looked up.
"The ceiling was falling in," she recalled. "I looked to my left and saw a gun. And heard, 'get in your room.'"
Security at Temple Israel was responding to a gunman in a truck that burst through the building, an attack the FBI would later characterize as a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism targeting the largest synagogue in Michigan.
Otis, the lead teacher in the toddler room, ran back to her little ones ages 15 to 20 months.
Second nature kicked in for Otis, who said just weeks prior, staff had done routine security training. She locked the bulletproof glass doors, pulled the blinds, moved all the children behind changing tables – and grabbed Cheerios and an iPad so they could watch Elmo.
"They were so good," she told NPR in an interview. "They didn't cry – as long as the Cheerios were flowing."
Otis then heard gunshots, so many she thought there were multiple shooters running through the building.
"The only thought I had was, I'm going to die. So if he – or they – come in, I'm going to lay on the babies, because I'm going to die regardless," she said, voice cracking. "I was more scared that they were going to die."
After 45 minutes, she evacuated with kids in tow as police in tactical gear stormed in.
Her classroom was ten feet away from where the truck blasted through the building.
A Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism
Normally, an unknown truck sitting in the parking lot at Temple Israel would raise red flags, but the attacker came on a Thursday, one of the two days each month where the synagogue holds a food pantry that feeds 250 families across metro Detroit.
He had filled his truck with 35 gallons of gasoline in an effort to enhance the power of fireworks stuffed inside. He was armed with an AR-style rifle with ten magazines and 300 rounds of ammunition. He searched online for what time lunch was served.
"I have booby-trapped the car. I will forcefully enter and start shooting at them. God willing, I will kill as many of them as I possibly can," he said in videos sent to his sister.
He rammed through the doors of the preschool, surging into a hallway usually teeming with children, steps away from a room for infants; a main thoroughfare where teachers push babies in strollers and staff have meetings.
He traveled 200 feet down the hallway and got wedged in – unable to get out. The vehicle had struck the director of security, shattering his leg, who then dragged himself down the hallway to bolt the doors of a baby room shut before passing out.
The attacker set off fireworks from inside the vehicle. Minutes later, it was on fire and the hallway filled with smoke. He exchanged gunfire with security guards before shooting himself in the head.
There were 110 children and 55 staffers in the building. Everyone made it out alive.
'Every inch of the building has been gutted'
Walking through Temple Israel now is like walking through a ghost town. Electrical wires hang from charred ceilings, plastic sheets separate exposed wall studs, dust carpets the bare floors.
"I don't think people understand that every inch of the building has been gutted and is in shambles and needs to be rebuilt," said Rabbi Jen Lader as she showed NPR the building. "The aftermath is just devastating."
When the truck ignited, heavy black smoke coated the walls and swallowed up artwork, photographs, and hand-painted murals.
"The hallway filled with this thick, black, impenetrable smoke," she described. "The kind of darkness where you can't see your hand in front of your face and you're choking."
Some of the nearby offices and classrooms also filled with smoke.
"All of our kids are right here," Lader said, pointing to a line of classrooms feet away from where the truck was stuck. "They could hear every shot. Their experience was near death, a murderer coming into our house and trying to blow it up and murder them in their classrooms."
She said people keep talking to her about how God protected the congregation.
"I actually can't live in that space because there are a lot of bad things that happen in this world. It makes me think about the Tree of Life shooting and the 11 people who were gunned down in their house of worship," Lader said, shaking her head. "I can't believe in a God that would protect us and not them. And so for me, I really see it as luck."
Luck, she said, and security preparedness.
"We spend $800,000 a year just on our security team," Lader said. "It's money we could be spending on feeding hungry people, sending kids to camp, giving scholarships for preschool, and instead we are funding our own army to keep ourselves safe."
Resilience after terror
The smoke from the truck set off the sprinklers, which led to flooding. Next to nothing was salvageable. The Torahs are the exception, since sprinklers weren't installed over the arks.
The temple brought in a parchment expert to examine the rescued holy books; he joyfully proclaimed at a recent Shabbat service they remain "beautiful." They're currently being stored at the nearby Holocaust center. "It's a heart palpitation moment when you think about where they are and why," Lader said.
The building is now undergoing a ten million dollar rebuild.
In the meantime, other Jewish and non-Jewish institutions in the area have opened their doors to the Temple Israel community, which comprises over three thousand families.
Before the preschool reopened elsewhere, teachers were busy running playgroups, doing zoom calls with toddlers, and meeting kids at the park so children didn't have to wait to be reunited.
Numbers haven't dwindled. Nearly a thousand people attended the first Shabbat service after the attack, held in a temporary location.
Every single teacher came back.
"We kept saying, if you don't feel like you can come back to teach, if you don't feel like you can send your children back, there will always be a spot for you whenever you want," said Rabbi Arianna Gordon, who serves as director of education and lifelong learning. "And everyone returned. I think it speaks to how even in this moment of trauma and tragedy, everyone needs each other."
Gordon said she's heard from people who have experienced mass violence, including the rabbi from Tree of Life, the pastor in Charleston and pastors from Grand Blanc.
"The outreach has been so helpful," she said, adding it's made her think about the importance of extending her hand back out.
"That is going to be an important part of the work I do in the months and years to come," adding she's already reached out to clergy in London.
'People ask us, what's the big deal?'
Two of Eddie Rubin's three children were at Temple Israel the day of the attack.
"I discovered my son was safe when I saw an image in a video online of him running away with a policeman clutching his hand," Rubin said. "That image is ingrained in my head."
His two-year-old has been more anxious since the attack and has started to see a therapist. His four-year-old keeps asking why anyone would want to hurt a temple.
"The trauma is real," he said. "I've seen it manifested already in our kids. My wife the other week saw a spider on the ceiling and just naturally screamed, and my four year-old daughter dropped to the floor in the cover mode, crying and shaking, and we couldn't get her out of it."
The attack has him struggling to answer bigger questions about the safety of Jews in America.
"I think back to the late thirties, early forties, and as things started to happen, Kristallnacht, etc – was there someone sitting there going, ok, this is now time to actually make a radical change and we need to get out? Am I foolish for not taking this warning of, oh, you need to get out?"
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Maran Grant, who teaches two year-olds at Temple Israel, views the experience like an iceberg.
"The part you see is the terrorist attack and the destruction of our space, but there's so much going on underneath the water that most people aren't aware of," she said. "Whether it's mental or emotional or physical, having to exist in spaces you're not comfortable in, and it's going to take a long time to feel normal."
She and her husband Josh are longtime congregants, and they said the wider response to the attack has been heartbreaking.
"People have said to us, 'what's the big deal? Everybody was fine, why is your life revolving around this?'" Maran said.
"Because someone came into our home and tried to kill us," replied her husband.
"It's really difficult when it's a persecution based on your faith," Josh Grant added. "It doesn't matter if you pray in a church or a mosque or a synagogue. There's no reason for any of this hatred."
Maran said she doesn't want her students or children to be scared to be Jewish.
"I don't want this to define the trajectory of their Jewishness," she said. "I want them to seek the joy that is being Jewish."
Anger about the coverage
Several congregants spoke to NPR about their anger and disappointment over the way the attack was covered, pointing to news coverage that prominently featured how the attacker had family who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon. According to the Israel Defense Forces, one of the attacker's brothers was a commander for Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia group that's designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.
"He had family who were killed, which is obviously awful," said Maran Grant. "But he went through preschool doors with the intent of killing our children and our teachers. And even though that happened, never, never in a million years would I think to do the same to someone else."
Rabbi Lader said she believes the coverage gave people permission to dismiss the attack.
"To have a news story that reads: a car hit a synagogue filled with children and everyone was fine and the terrorist's siblings were murdered across the ocean by Jews, it allows people to shrug their shoulders and say, 'I don't know what they're so upset about – nobody was killed. He was making a political statement,'" she said. "It makes it acceptable for people to justify a terrorist attack against American children."
In the days after the attack, Temple Israel shut down its voicemail system because of vitriolic messages.
"To conflate what happens across the world between people and governments that we do not vote for, with a school filled with babies and staff who are Americans is so rabidly antisemitic that it seemed impossible it was real," Lader said.
She pointed to calls over the last several years to 'globalize the intifada,'; "it feels like the intifada is here," noting that just within the last month, there were stabbings of Jews in London, a soldier in Louisiana who threatened to attack a synagogue, and a plot to "kill as many Jews as possible" in a Texas synagogue.
'I want people to know that we're struggling'
Elise Otis is back to working 40 hours a week.
"During the day, I'm ok," she said. But within a week of the attack, the nightmares began.
"There was a gunman and there were babies I couldn't get to," she remembered. "The [dreams] are the same. They're just that – get the babies, just get the babies."
She said she's worried that terror attacks will become the norm.
"I need people to understand that Jewish people in America are struggling," she said.
There are days, she said, when it's hard to put on a brave face, and that she can't wait for Temple Israel to reopen and return to teaching there.
"My class was so bright and happy – it was sparkly," she said, sighing. "It'll be a happy room again. It really is just a building – it's us that make it a place, a home."
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