Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in an undated photo. The two were killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum on March 21. Courtesy of Embassy of Israel to the United States/Twitter
By Louis Keene
May 22, 2025
The man who allegedly walked up to two Israeli embassy staffers and shot them dead Wednesday night reportedly told eyewitnesses he “did it for Gaza.”
But the event those staffers had just left at the Capital Jewish Museum highlighted an organization that supplied aid to Gaza during the Israel-Hamas War. And his victims had made peacebuilding central to their work.
The Israeli embassy identified the victims Thursday as Sarah Milgrim, an employee in its department of public diplomacy, and Yaron Lischinsky, a research assistant. Milgrim was American, and Lischinsky a Germany-born Israeli.
Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said the two were a couple, and Lischinsky had bought an engagement ring and planned to propose next week.
The attack occurred after a Jewish networking event held by the American Jewish Committee, in which speakers from the humanitarian aid groups IsraAID and the Multifaith Alliance discussed their work.
That may have had particular appeal to Lischinsky and Milgrim, who each appeared to have a passion for peace and coalition building.
According to a LinkedIn profile that appears to belong to Lischinsky, his job for the embassy entailed monitoring politics in the Middle East and North Africa, collaborating with think tanks and helping to organize delegation visits from various Israeli ministries.
Lischinsky described himself in his LinkedIn bio as “an ardent believer” in the Abraham Accords — a landmark set of normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries — and said he believed in “expanding the circle of peace” with Israel’s Arab neighbors.
“To this end, I advocate for interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding,” Lischinsky wrote.
Milgrim, too, described doing research on peacebuilding theory — “emphasizing grassroots initiatives in the Israeli-Palestinian region,” she wrote — as an employee of Tech2Peace, an Israeli program that combines entrepreneurial training and conflict dialogue for young Palestinians and Israelis.
Milgrim’s master’s project, for the American University School of International Service, analyzed the role of friendships in the peacebuilding process, according to a 2023 LinkedIn post.
It is unclear what the suspect, identified by police as Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old from Chicago, knew about his victims or about the event, or why he targeted them.
The Multifaith Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit that addresses displacement crises, has been on the ground distributing aid in Gaza throughout the Israel-Hamas war. The group said in March it had supplied more than 300 truckloads of aid containing essential winter supplies, hygiene products, and nutritious food to families in Gaza over the previous six months; in April it said three of its volunteers had been killed in an Israeli attack.
IsraAID is an Israeli NGO that has worked closely with displaced Israeli residents of the area near the Gaza border. After seven World Central Kitchen volunteers were killed when their aid convoy was attacked by the Israeli army, IsraAID said it was “shocked and devastated” and called for better protection for aid workers.
“Yaron and Sarah were our friends and colleagues. They were in the prime of their lives,” the Israeli embassy wrote in a statement Thursday. “This evening, a terrorist shot and killed them as they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in DC. The entire embassy staff is heartbroken and devastated by their murder. No words can express the depth of our grief and horror at this devastating loss.”
