Interview | Eyewitness JoJo Drake Kalin on Shooting at Capital Jewish Museum

Last night a man shot and killed two young Israeli embassy employees, Yarón Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside an event at the Jewish Capital Museum in Washington, DC. Along with dozens of other young diplomats and nonprofit staffers, the couple had been attending the American Jewish Committee’s annual Young Diplomats reception. Lischinsky, 30, who worked as a researcher at the embassy, was Israeli. Milgrim, 26, from Overland Park, KS, worked in the Department of Public Diplomacy there. 

Jojo Drake Kalin, 30, an organizer of the event, was inside the museum when confusion broke out. In the lobby she found herself handing a cup of water to a man she perceived as distraught and “disheveled.” Then, she says, he began shouting “Free Palestine, Free Palestine!” and uniformed men converged on him and led him away. Police later said he was the shooter,  identified as Elias Rodriguez. When Moment’s Amy E. Schwartz spoke with her at 3:30 a.m. this morning, a little over six hours since the tragic shooting, she still hadn’t slept.

You were at the Capital Jewish Museum when Yarón Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot. What happened? 

I didn’t hear the shots. I was up on the third floor—they had opened all the exhibits and I was checking out the one on LGBTQ Jewish history. And then 9 o’clock struck, and the museum employees started wanting to close down. My husband and my friend Katie heard the shots, but I was probably still in the exhibit, or else in the elevator.

“I’m still processing the fact that I looked evil right in the eye and offered him water.”

I’d guess there were 30 people still in the museum, maybe as many as 50. At first there was a bit of a frenzy with reports that there had been a shooting outside. For some reason, even though it was a Jewish event, at a Jewish venue, by a Jewish group, we had the reaction, “Oh, it’s DC crime. Maybe a gang shooting, we’ll just have to follow instructions from security.” What I missed, but a friend of mine witnessed, was that a security guard opened the door and let in a man who she thought was a passerby. He turned out to be the suspect. Ironically, there had just been an article published 23 hours before, saying that the Jewish Museum just got a grant to increase security. 

Anyway, he was let in, and I could see his nervous system was plainly out of whack. He also seemed disheveled. I know now that it’s because he’d just point blank executed two people! But at the time I thought he’d been a witness to something and was upset. What I heard later, secondhand, from people who witnessed him actually being let in, was that he seemed to be asking for refuge. So it was perceived as offering him safety.

 

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I felt bad for him. I asked if he wanted water. He said yes, great, and I got him the water and handed it to him. He was standing at a high-top bar, and then seconds later he whipped out a red keffiyeh and shouted “Free Palestine, Free Palestine!” I don’t know if they were museum security guards or police, but uniformed persons came over and were able to subdue him and got him out the door.

At that point, we still didn’t know anyone had died. I didn’t manage to talk to everyone, but from those I did talk to, we all had yet to understand the severity. We thought maybe he’d shot the gun to make a noise so he could get inside and then do a protest. Your brain just doesn’t jump to the worst possible scenario. Then 20-30 minutes later, the detectives came in, and they said, if you saw a white man in blue pants, come upstairs and we’ll get your eyewitness testimony. They didn’t let us discuss it with each other—to get a clean account, I guess—so they interviewed us two by two, and it was while I was sitting in that room that I started getting texts from people: “Are you OK?” “We saw the news, we saw that people were shot.” I was in one of those upstairs rooms that the museum uses for workshops—not for our event but for regular visitors, including kids—with cute cards on the tables saying “Create a welcome sign!” And that’s when I first heard people had died. 

I don’t know at what point the police made the connection that the man yelling inside was also the suspect in the shooting. They didn’t immediately tell us, either. They wanted to do their investigation and get all the eyewitness testimony. We found it out as it was being corroborated and validated through my various press contacts. Once we realized people died, we started putting two and two together. We were as much in the dark as the public was. 

I never saw a weapon. He told police he left it outside. I can’t speculate as to a depraved person’s intention, but I just feel lucky he didn’t shoot up more people inside the event. I was lucky my husband stayed and was with me. He wanted to go home earlier, but I wanted to stay longer because it was my event and I wanted to clean up. 

When I finally got into the Uber to go home, I was hearing the news on the radio, and that’s when I heard a lot of details confirmed, including that people had died. It’s crazy how quickly information spreads. I didn’t know the names of the victims, or that they were from the Israeli embassy, until I talked to a friend from Jewish Insider.

It’s so uncanny to have lived it but then to be told through the media things that had just happened to me in real time. I’m still processing the fact that I looked evil right in the eye and offered him water. 

What was the theme of last night’s event, and what was your role in it?

I was an organizer of the event. I don’t want to center myself or make it about me, but I can’t help thinking, they were only here because of this event I organized. Guilt doesn’t bring them back, but it’s something I’ll have to process for a while.

I wasn’t officially counting,  but anywhere between 115 and 150 people showed up, from embassies, from the State Department and nonprofits. I don’t work for the American Jewish Committee full time, but in a volunteer capacity for the AJC DC ACCESS Young Professional Board. Each major city has a Young Professionals board and there’s a YP program called ACCESS,, and you get free or paid tickets to  events like this one. I serve on the board and also on the planning committee. I only recently got into Jewish advocacy, post-October 7, but I’ve worked for a number of NGOs and nonprofits, and it was my relationships with those groups that brought in these particular speakers. My idea was to speak about something that seemed so especially topical at this moment, a story of bridge-building.

“It’s so deeply ironic that we were all there in a nonpolitical way—Jews and non-Jews alike, representatives of 30 embassies—with the intention of turning pain into purpose.”

The speakers’ remarks and even the list of participating organizations were off the record, but the theme was our collective humanity and the humanitarian aid work they’re pursuing in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region, serving that region and getting that aid into Gaza and also bridge-building generally. We talked about how trust is a rare commodity in the Middle East, and hard to build, but up until the blockade, it was happening, we were making progress. It’s so deeply ironic that we were all there in a nonpolitical way—Jews and non-Jews alike, representatives of 30 embassies—with the intention of, as per the event’s theme, turning pain into purpose.

All we hear is the us-versus-them narrative, and we need to replace it with a narrative of relationship and bridge-building. I just hope this depraved act doesn’t do the opposite, and that we’ll remain undeterred and not lose our humanity, and that we’ll keep moving forward in spite of this.

Had you felt threatened by antisemitism before tonight?

Nothing to this extent or magnitude, but right after October 7, there was a lot of stuff in our neighborhood, a lot of graffiti and signs declaring “From the River to the Sea” or “Zionism is the new Nazism,” which made me concerned to wear any Judaica, because that was very violent rhetoric to be seeing day to day. The language was so clearly antisemitic. But that was just a feeling of hypervigilance.

I grew up in a little town, in Farmville, North Carolina, and I wasn’t Jewish growing up—I converted after I met my husband. [I’m surprised] it took me as long as it did tonight to think this thing I was experiencing was actually a hate crime—instead I was thinking, “Oh, this is regular run-of- the-mill urban violence.” The majority of people there didn’t put two and two together. We thought maybe the man fired shots in the air to get attention and get inside. People protest at Jewish museums all the time, even though museums aren’t Israel or Netanyahu, and Jews aren’t Netanyahu, but they can’t untangle it.

It’s bizarre, but how do you get in the head of a killer? Maybe this was his first act of violence?

How are you now? 

I’m a little calmer now, still a lot of adrenaline. My husband and some friends and my mother-in-law are here—that’s when it’s nice to be near family. My mother-in-law is a documentary filmmaker, and she just came right over. Actually, when we called her at midnight, she didn’t even pick up right away—she’d gotten to bed early. When she did, we told her what had happened, and she came right over and made me soup—the quintessential Jewish mother support reaction.

I’ve tried three times to pour myself a glass of water, to stay hydrated—and each time I think about how the last time I poured a glass of water, it was for a depraved murderer. And I couldn’t drink it. I’ll have to work through that with a therapist. I mean, how many of us have interacted with a murderer right after a murder? I remember he was shaking. As an empathetic person, I was concerned and figured he was upset because he’d just witnessed the incident, or the shooting, whatever it was.  

More importantly, in any ongoing conversations, I want to emphasize that this wasn’t just any Jewish event. There are so many Jewish events, but this one was particularly unique because we were elevating and platforming and spotlighting a story of how organizations from the region are working together to get humanitarian aid into Gaza. How despite our different political opinions, we can still find our collective humanity. So, the dichotomy is not lost on me: Someone wanting to destroy, not just the people who died—and as they say, each person is a whole world—but also to destroy the ecosystems of people around them, to come in and cause such destruction, at an event that was the utter opposite, is profound. 

How I’ll move forward is to ensure these deaths are not in vain. I want their memories to be a blessing. It’s easy to have our hearts hardened, so I hope people say he’s not representative of Palestinians, that both Palestinians and Jews deserve to live in peace and that there shouldn’t be Islamophobia or antisemitism. That’s what I want to amplify. Yes, it was antisemitic. Yes, it was a hate crime. But I feel compelled to use it for—and this isn’t my phrase, it’s something I’ve seen quoted by the CEO of one of the organizations that attended—“post-traumatic growth.”

A lot of what we’ve been working on is interfaith-based, focusing on how when we do come together and find our collective humanity, what good can come from that. About getting humanitarian aid into Gaza without getting it diverted, building relations on the ground. When you have just the two sides it’s hard to find commonality, but with an intermediary group that’s interfaith and has been doing work on this, it can sometimes happen. Our initiative was having some success, from around September 2024 to March 2025, until the aid blockade.  

As I said, the speakers’ remarks and even the groups’ attendance were off the record. It makes sense why they were scared, right? And it was also done to keep the work sacred, and so they felt more comfortable. Sound bites can be so misconstrued if you don’t have context. This way they can go further; better than exchanging bits on Instagram.

Judging from [the shooter’s] name, he wasn’t even Palestinian. I don’t know how he got radicalized—or, I probably do know, since we know how social media right now has been such a transformative but also such a destructive tool. I mean, I don’t know a thing about him, actually, so I shouldn’t say anything.

I’ll just add that I didn’t hear anyone say anything hateful to him—even when they were yanking him out.