Metro Detroiters feel pain, fear, despair over Israel-Hamas war

Pain, fear, despair.

Last fall, the feelings came fast, and ran deep for many metro Detroiters. And as the seasons changed, the intensity got worse.

On Oct. 7, 2023, 6,000 miles away, the militant group Hamas killed an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in an attack in southern Israel , the deadliest in the country's history, and took another 250 people hostage — including some Americans. Nearly 100 Israeli hostages remain in captivity, the American Jewish Committee says .

Israel's retaliatory war on Gaza has now killed more than 41,700 Palestinians over the last year and wounded more than 96,700 others, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said last week . The U.N. estimated that 90% of Gaza's 2.1 million residents have been displaced , ordered to evacuate with limited access to food and water and their homes and businesses destroyed. This spring, the World Bank estimated $18.5 billion in damage to Gaza's critical infrastructure in the first four months of the war.

Because of metro Detroit's significant Jewish and Arab American communities , the war and its deadly outcomes are uniquely centered in our region.

Families grieve loved ones and grapple with the feelings of powerlessness as they struggle to aid and protect those who remain in danger. Protesters continue to mobilize, hoping to influence U.S. policymakers and public sentiment to end the conflict, even helping spawn a national movement that could affect the U.S. presidential election.

Our communities fear rising antisemitism, and Islamophobia. They feel threatened. Some feel the pain of lost family or friends, but even those without direct connection to their ancestral homelands see themselves in those slain overseas. And both communities despair, perceiving the rest of the world is indifferent to their suffering.

Pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses believe they are targeted because of their cause. Safety concerns are growing over assaults on Jewish college students. Religious and community leaders work to maintain relationships forged over years but strained by increasing death tolls.

How has life been for those with strong ties to Israel, Gaza and the Middle East? The Free Press interviewed six local people from our communities to understand, a year later, how Oct. 7 has changed their lives. In some ways, what we heard in both communities was a shared set of emotions: pain, fear, despair.

These are their stories:

Oct. 7 attacks bring disbelief and then worry for Franklin woman

Leah Trosch's husband shook her awake on the morning of Oct. 7 to tell her the grim news of the attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

She immediately texted her cousin, who lives a few miles from the border.

"She told me that she and her husband and her three children were barricaded in their safe room and her husband was stationed at the door holding his gun," said Trosch, 62, of Franklin. "The whole community was on alert because they didn't know what was going to happen."

Trosch grew up in Southfield. Her parents were Holocaust survivors who lived in Israel before immigrating to the United States. She has traveled throughout Israel many times to visit her extended family and through her volunteer work with the Jewish Federation of Detroit , an umbrella group that partners with other nonprofits to provide social services, cultural enrichment and support for Israel.

Trosch is a retired architect. She speaks Hebrew fluently and she considers Israel her home away from home. As she goes about her daily routine, cooking in her kitchen or puttering in her garden, she can't stop thinking about her relatives there.

"First, there was the disbelief," she said "Then it's the worry for your family and friends there, and then clearly the response here was to put blame on the Israelis. And there was this incredible rise in antisemitism and antisemitic rhetoric so quickly. Some of it was actually the silence which was so upsetting for so many of us. Other communities, friends outside of the Jewish community, were not there to be supportive."

Trosch was scheduled to fly to Israel 10 days after the attack, but those plans were quickly canceled. She did visit in December on a mission trip through the Jewish Federation. She said when she stepped off the plane in Tel Aviv she was startled to see the normally bustling Ben Gurion Airport was eerily quiet.

"It was deserted," she said. "Then when you got in the main hall there, they had posters with the faces of all the hostages, one, after another, after another. That was the first thing that greeted you and it was heartbreaking."

She said she struggles to understand the attack because the Gaza Envelope, the border region where her cousin lives, is among the most liberal parts of the country. People live there, she said, because they believe they can get along with their neighbors in Gaza.

Trosch said her cousin hired a woman from Gaza to clean her home.

"She used to go and drive and pick her up from the crossing and bring her to her house to clean and pay her," Trosch said. "She tried to help her. I'm talking like seven years. They had a real relationship and of course, since Oct. 7, she never heard from her again."

She said her politics don't match those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She knew the hostage taking would complicate an Israeli response, but said something had to be done.

Trosch said she's anguished to see the civilian casualties in Gaza, but she blames them mostly on Hamas, for launching the attack and for hiding its weapons and its fighters in densely populated areas.

"The idea that Israelis and the Jewish people don't feel any remorse is so wrong," she said. "We value life above everything and it's heartbreaking that they do that to their own people. But that is not a reason for us to lay down and let them slaughter us."

Level of family's suffering hard to comprehend for local doctor

Alaa Ali said his youngest brother was the first in his family in Gaza to be killed since Oct. 7.

It was November 2023, one month into Israel's assault on Gaza. Displaced from their home, Mohammad Ali, 29, went to find water for his wife and children and never returned. He was presumed killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Alaa Ali, an urgent care doctor in metro Detroit, walked into his Walled Lake clinic when he got the call from another brother in Gaza, who said Mohammad Ali was dead.

"I died at that moment," Ali, 47, said.

His brother was "the best among us" in their large family; the remaining siblings, four brothers and three sisters live in Gaza, Ali said. He was generous, truthful, humble, hardworking. He lived in Gaza City's Rimal neighborhood that has since been wiped out by Israeli airstrikes.

He said his cousin, a nurse at central Gaza's now-destroyed hospital Al-Shifa, was seen by the nurse's son being taken by Israeli forces along with others later that month, Ali said. His body was returned to Ali's family nearly a year later and they have little detail about his death, he said.

The killings continued. As of September, 130 members of Ali's close and extended family in Gaza are now dead, he said.

"Every week, we're losing one, two, three of them. In one day, we lost almost 13 of my family members," Ali said.

It's a suffering, he said, that is so beyond comprehension, he often wishes he did not exist to witness it.

Every day, he checks WhatsApp to see whether his brothers and sisters are alive. After they evacuated to southern Gaza, they've been displaced over a dozen more times, from one tent to another.

They're living in tents now, south of Deir al-Balah, he said. Every morning is the same:

They wake up at 4 a.m. and walk miles with jugs to find water from a well. Then they spend hours finding food. Finding medicine. It took months for Ali's brother to find care for his 3-year-old son whose skin rash began to eat at the child's flesh.

"Basically, people are in prison. And in the prison, they're being bombed, killed, massacred, and deprived" of basic needs, Ali said.

"The line between life and death in Gaza does not exist," he continued, his eyes wide, urgent.

An investigation by the Associated Press identified at least 60 Palestinian families that had 25 or more family members killed in bombings between October and December.

When Ali speaks to his family, they talk to one another as if it's their last time.

Ali never feels like he's doing enough to help his family. After Oct. 7, he co-founded Michigan's chapter of Doctors Against Genocide. The group organized numerous medical missions. He spoke of his brother's death in front of over 400,000 people in January at the March on Washington for Gaza. And he said he has gone to the White House to tell President Joe Biden's staff his story, and what doctors have witnessed in Gaza.

"You see a (child), who's about 2, 3 years old, and half of the head is not there. And you see a mother (with) a hole in her chest," Ali said of photos he has seen.

It's not just Ali and other doctors who have seen the atrocities on the ground in Gaza — there's "a 24/7 livestream of genocide" on social media, Ali said.

The world sees it, he said — "And instead of standing with the oppressed, they're standing with the oppressor, proudly."

As for the doctor, he said he knows what's right.

He'll go back to Gaza one day, he said, and he'll save lives there. Not because he's Palestinian, or from Gaza. But because he's human.

By Andrea May Sahouri

Stuck in Ann Arbor, poet fears for family in Gaza

Yahya Ashour said he became mute when he heard that his home in Gaza City was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike less than a week after Oct. 7 last year and just hours after his family had evacuated to southern Gaza.

The Palestinian poet, who was visiting Ann Arbor for a poetry reading, did not speak aloud for weeks, only communicating through handwritten notes. It was painful to see the photos of what was once his room — his "safe space in this crazy world." Under the rubble, he saw the shelving of what he had called "The Library" that housed hundreds of books he fought through a multitude of Israeli restrictions over the years to bring into Gaza.

Ashour was one of the few Palestinians in Gaza who have been lucky to travel. Israel controls who and what can enter and leave the strip, described as the world's largest open-air prison by human rights organizations .

Israel gave him permission to go to the United States for the Palestinian Writes Festival in Philadelphia in September, followed by a string of poetry readings elsewhere, including stops in Ann Arbor. He now lives in the college town, unable to return home.

"I never imaged back then this is the last time I will see my house, and the last time I will see my room," Ashour, 26, told the Free Press. His home was hit on Oct. 12. He had just finished a reading at the University of Michigan.

"Now I lost everything."

He said he saw, in a family member's video of his destroyed home, a Palestinian flag that hung from a coat hanger on the door. It's a reminder of the resilience Gazans must have as they're forced to live through Israel's 17-year blockade of Gaza, he said. Ashour doesn't remember a time when things were "normal."

What he remembers is suffocation, no hope for the future, one bombing from Israel after another.

"It's a systematic dehumanization of Palestinian lives," he said. But Israel's yearlong decimation of Gaza since Oct. 7 is a devastation even the poet struggles to find words for.

Ashour lost three cousins and over 13 friends from Israel's bombings. He wonders about his other friends, whether they're alive or dead.

And he can't stop thinking of his family in Gaza, who are now living in tents — his mother, his five siblings, and his now-malnourished 10 nieces and nephews, all under the age of 10.

"They're missing ... this important part of their life where they get introduced to letters and numbers and instead they are getting introduced to bombs," Ashour said.

He misses the sea, the place where he felt connected to himself and connected to Gaza the most. Even if Ashour could go back and reunite with his family, there would be nothing to go back to — his family is now living in tents, their days spent finding food, water — anything to survive. On WhatsApp, his mother cries out to him, wishing they were together.

Ashour found his voice again. This year, he has visited numerous universities throughout the country reading his work. Through poetry, he has tried to describe the devastation in Gaza, hoping that when others hear it, they remember his words:

"In Gaza,/ people are blessed/ with darkness/ while they wait for missiles/ to rain down on them/ and have their wounds/ healed once and for all,/ rendering them/ ashes, rubble,/ and body parts..."

But he can't go back.

So he's trying to raise enough money to get them through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, a costly and dangerous journey, by selling a short electronic book of his poetry he has written since Oct. 7

"To my family, this is me trying to save you with my words," he begins in his book, "hoping one day my words too will reunite us again."

By Andrea May Sahouri

Jewish journalist fueled by responsibility to readers

It was a day of infamy and it was also Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday whose commemoration includes dancing with the Torah in the streets.

Reports were still arriving about the Oct. 7 slaughter in Israel. But tradition called for dancing, said Andrew Lapin, so outside the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit, "that's what we did."

Peering back a year later, he described it as "a dance of resilience" — a reminder from the participants to themselves that Jews had overcome tragedy before, and the best thing they could do was what they would have done anyway.

The next morning, Lapin, 35, was back on the job. Back on the phone and the computer from his home in Ypsilanti. Back where he has been, seemingly nonstop, trying to make sense of an increasingly muddled world as a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

Someone who had relished his life as a University of Michigan student has spent most of these turbulent 12 months on college campuses, in an atmosphere he never could have foreseen when he was an editor at The Michigan Daily and a trombonist in the marching band.

The experience has changed where he does his job, changed how much of it he brings home, and even changed how his friends see him, though that is based in grace.

"They understand that this is hard," he said, "and they want to know if I'm OK."

The answer is mostly, most of the time.

"I had done stories on campuses before," Lapin said, about arguments regarding what Zionism means and what Israel should be. But the colliding among visions "hadn't been the central breaking point of American life, the way it has become."

The JTA, founded in 1917 and based in New York, is the world's most widely read news service for Judaism and Jewish-related topics. Even as most of its employees practice Judaism, it practices journalism, which makes Lapin a neutral player.

"I have a lot of conversations with people on all sides of the issues," he said, leaving him at least somewhat unique, and also somewhat convenient when somebody needs to unload.

"I often feel like I'm being asked to hold their pains or their concerns," he said. "Or, I'm a place to vent frustrations with whatever the other side is doing."

He has learned, he said, that the American Jewish community is more divided about the war than most people recognize. He has learned as well that the coffee shops where he liked to work before Oct. 7 are no longer so ideal; If he's having a conversation about Jews or Israel, he'd just as soon avoid being overheard.

And, he has learned, he needs to be careful about dragging his tensions through his front door.

With their first child due in March, Lapin said, "My wife would tell me, 'You're bringing the war home. It feels like some sort of boundary has been violated.' "

She's right, he said. At the same time, he has responsibilities — to his readers, to his employer, maybe even to history.

If the need arises, he'll go into his home office and make sure to shut the door. Then he'll soldier on.

Local Holocaust survivor fears 'frightening' antisemitism

As a Holocaust survivor who views Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Sophie Klisman has found the past year "disturbing."

The attacks of Oct. 7 reignited haunting memories and fears of antisemitism for the 95-year-old West Bloomfield resident. Killings at Israeli military bases and a music festival conjured for her the faces of young Israeli Defense Forces soldiers with whom she returned to Auschwitz on a 2019 mission trip.

It was as if she knew the victims of the massacres personally, she said. She couldn't get them out of her mind. Every hostage death since has felt the same, she said, "so painful — like losing a member of your family."

"It's frightening, the antisemitism — because I thought it was gone," Klisman said. "I thought people realized what the Holocaust did to innocent children, babies and now (the antisemitism is) there and nobody can explain why."

The Polish-born survivor has a deep love for Israel.

She remembers learning of the country's 1948 founding on the radio, while living in a United Nations displacement camp in Germany with other survivors unable to return to their home countries, where antisemitism still raged.

She was elated. Finally, Jews had a homeland — one that would go on to take in nearly two-thirds of those displaced after the Nazi genocide. She and her campmates danced the Hora in celebration.

"My thought has always been that if there was a state of Israel, maybe the Holocaust would have never happened, the suffering and the loss of life that I experienced would not have happened," said Klisman. More than two dozen of her family members were wiped out; only a sister and uncle survived.

In the 75 years since Israel's founding, Klisman has anxiously followed from afar the various wars that have threatened the country. By the 2019 Auschwitz-Israel trip sponsored by the nonprofit Friends of the IDF, she felt its future was secure.

The mission trip aimed "to celebrate that Hitler didn't accomplish his wish to kill all the Jews," she said. "It was so emotional that we have a country that is thriving and growing and we're here to stay, the Jewish people."

The massacres of Oct. 7 — which Israeli leaders have called the deadliest day for Jewish civilians since the Holocaust — upended that thinking. Klisman is now again uneasily monitoring the TV news, this time in her apartment complex where the war dominates daily conversation.

She has had difficulty making sense of why Hamas, the group controlling the occupied Gaza Strip, would want to harm Israelis, and sees its motivations as purely antisemitic. Global protests over Israel's bloody retaliatory assault are antisemitic too, she says, "because if you're against Israel, you're against the Jewish people."

With tensions escalating in the now regional war, Klisman says her greatest wish is for Israel to be preserved as a country where Jews can find some semblance of peace.

"Just Israel, just save it, I don't care." she said. "I'm a good human being, I couldn't hurt a fly, but Israel. ...

"And I'm very much for Netanyahu, he's a strong leader ..."

When asked about the war's fallout — including reports of starvation, disease and a civilian death toll that has drawn genocide accusations in international court — Klisman grows conflicted.

"I feel bad when I see on TV, for the innocent children and women — Palestinians," she said. "Israel has to be strong and prepared for whatever happens, but, personally I think the killing should stop."

For this pastry chef, hospitality and humanity go hand in hand

When she first learned of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Lebanese American Dearborn native and local pastry chef Amanda Saab anticipated a similar pattern that she had witnessed of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian territories all her life.

"A part of me thought this was just going to be like every other time where there's some escalation and then it just simmers out," she said. As time went on and the violence continued, she understood things were different. "This is not the same as the clashes we've been conditioned to see for so long."

A former social worker, Saab has always had an altruistic approach to feeding others. She has hosted dinners that aimed to create a level of understanding of the Muslim faith, bake sales to support reproductive rights and racial justice and, most recently, she took on the role as director of programs for the Detroit Food Academy , a nonprofit that cultivates culinary experiences for Detroit youths.

"It's taken a part of my being away — to bear witness, to see youth being blown up when so much of my life focuses on youth and pouring into them," Saab said on the emotional toll the conflict has taken on her. "(The war) has shifted my entire worldview and my perspective on life," she said. "It's emphasized the things that are really important to me — family, community, the planet, food access, food sovereignty — it gave me more focus in that regard."

The war inspired Saab, whose paternal grandmother was born in the Palestinian territories, to found Chefs for Palestine , an interfaith, intercultural dinner series designed to raise relief funds for civilian suffering in Gaza.

To date, Saab has organized three Chefs for Palestine dinners — two in 2023 at Dearborn's Bint Jebail Cultural Center and one in January at the Arab American National Museum , the only Arab American museum in the country.

At each event, the room was scented with the eclectic aroma of cross-cultural cuisines, like the peppery scent of Korean fried chicken converging with warm notes of allspice in a tray of Jamaican rice and peas.

There were acknowledgements from a spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace and a Catholic priest, emotional expressions from a poet and live music by a local guitarist. And though each participant at Chefs for Palestine represented a different community, there was a shared agony over the families and children caught in the crossfires of the attacks on Gaza.

Rooted in three pillars: education, empowerment and solidarity; Chefs for Palestine called guests to do more than revel in the dishes served. Saab's intention for the series was to band a community of humanitarians together over a collective love of food to call for a cease-fire, to increase awareness about the war and to raise funds for nonprofit organizations providing aid to those impacted most by the attacks on Gaza.

The dinner series, with its $25 suggested donation for dishes from dozens of vendors, raised more than $100,000 of its $125,000 goal. All proceeds of the series benefited the Palestine Children's Relief Fund and the Palestinian American Medical Association and a letter-writing and postcard station racked up more than 540 letters to legislators demanding a cease-fire.

"It's absolutely terrifying that this is still ongoing," she said as we approach one year since the initial attacks.

She challenges those who don't see their role in making a change to find their voice.

"It's really important for all humans to not feel hopeless or helpless in these moments because so many of these systems have made us feel that we are powerless," she said, admitting that she too started to lose sight of her own power at a point. "It was after doing these Chefs for Palestine events that I turned inward. It's cliché but, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change."

By Lyndsay C. Green