Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were in the “prime of their lives” when they were gunned down outside Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum.
The young couple, who worked at the Israeli embassy in the capital, were leaving an event Wednesday night hosted by the American Jewish Committee when they were confronted by a gunman, who fired at “close range.”
Lischinsky, a 30-year-old diplomat, was just days away from proposing to 26-year-old Milgrim, a colleague at the embassy who grew up in Kansas.
The suspect has been named as Chicago man Elias Rodriguez, 30, who is in police custody. Rodriquez chanted “free, free Palestine” following his arrest over the shooting, police said.
Tributes have poured in from around the world for the young couple.
Couple was about to get engaged
The couple had been together just over a year and a half and were due to travel to Israel next week, where Lischinsky was going to ask Milgrim to marry him.
He had already purchased the ring and was going to propose in Jerusalem, Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, said.
“Instead of walking you down the aisle, we are walking with you to your graves,” Israeli diplomat and spokesperson Tal Naim said in a post on social media in the early hours of Thursday. “Just this morning, we were still laughing together by the coffee corner — and now, all that remains is a picture.”
Milgrim was due to meet her boyfriend’s family in Jerusalem for the first time.
Milgrim’s mother saw daughter was at the shooting on an app
Milgrim grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas. Her parents were getting ready for bed when news of the shooting broke late Wednesday.
Her mother, Nancy Milgrim, took out her cell phone and looked at the family locator app. It confirmed her worst fears — that her daughter was at the Capital Jewish Museum, The New York Times reports. She was due to fly to Washington Friday to look after her daughter’s dog while she was in Israel with Lischinsky, the newspaper reported.
“I pretty much already knew,” Sarah Milgrim’s father, Robert Milgrim, told the outlet. “I was hoping to be wrong.”
Shortly after checking the locator app, the phone rang. The Israeli ambassador was calling to inform the couple that their daughter and her boyfriend had been killed.
“What went through my mind is, I feel the antisemitism that has surfaced since Oct. 7 and also since the election of President Trump,” Robert Milgrim told The Times. “It’s just an extension of my worst fears.”
“The ironic part is that we were worried for our daughter’s safety in Israel,” he added. “But she was murdered three days before going.”
‘Her warmth and smile could light up any room’
Milgrim was working at the Israeli embassy, where her role involved organizing diplomatic missions and visits to Israel, according to the Israeli foreign ministry. She had worked there for about a year and a half, and it’s where she met Lischinsky.
A friend of Milgrim’s, Josh Maxey, said her “warmth and smile could light up any room.”
The friend said that he spoke to her at 5 p.m. on the day of the shooting for what was their final conversation.
“Last evening around 5 p.m., I called Sarah for what would be our last conversation to talk about World Pride and a special project she was working on,” Maxey wrote in the post on Facebook. “After business, we chatted about her upcoming trip to Israel and how she wanted to make sure everything was squared away for Pride and her special project because she did not want to leave her colleagues unprepared. That is who she was.”
“We first met a couple of years ago at an @israelinusa event. From that first meeting, I knew Sarah was a true mensch,” he said.
Maxey went on to describe Milgrim as “a true advocate for LGBTQ inclusion” in the local Jewish community.
The 26-year-old also spent time volunteering with the Tech2Peace non-profit, an organization that describes itself as providing “high-tech and entrepreneurial training alongside conflict dialogue to young Palestinians and Israelis.”
In a tribute, the organization said Milgrim was “a deeply curious person.”
“She brought people together with empathy and purpose, and her dedication to building a better future was evident in everything she did,” the tribute said. “Her voice and spirit will be profoundly missed.”
‘You could not have met a kinder soul’
Lischinsky, originally from Germany, worked as a research assistant for Middle East and North African Affairs in the Israeli embassy’s political department.
He moved from Germany to Israel when he was 16 and moved from Jerusalem to Washington, D.C. in September 2022.
Milgrim’s father told The Times that Lischinsky was an “incredible” person who was similar to his daughter.
“He was incredible,” Robert Milgrim told the newspaper. “He was very much like Sarah: passionate, extremely intelligent, dedicated to what he does, always on the cause of what’s right.”
Zineb Riboua, a friend of Lischinsky’s, said she was supposed to meet Milgrim for the first time the day after the shooting.
“He was full of curiosity and always brimming with ideas,” Riboua said. “I don’t think we ever had a conversation that didn’t leave me inspired to write something new. He loved America. He was excited about the future, about finally visiting Texas, and about the life he and his beloved fiancée were building together. I was supposed to meet her today.”
Another friend, David Boskey, described him as “a man of whom the world was not worthy” in a tribute.
“You could not have met a kinder soul,” Boskey wrote. “ He and I used to talk in the back of our congregation on Friday evenings in Jerusalem about life, ministry, identity, our futures, our passions, our faith… He was a man of conviction, of humility, of warmth, and of profound integrity. A man of whom the world was not worthy.”
