Safe Room
For Jews around the world, Israel has always been more than a country. It was meant to be a safe room — a place of refuge after centuries of persecution, a place where Jews could exist without fear.
And yet, on October 7, that sense of safety was shattered.
The attack was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — a day that reminded us, painfully, that even the idea of a “safe room” is fragile.
In the documentary Safe Room, directed by Haley Geffen, that concept takes on a new meaning. The film tells the story of a doctor in Israel who, in the midst of chaos and terror, sheltered families in a reinforced room. Over the course of a single, harrowing day, strangers became something more — a community bound together by fear, resilience, and survival.
What struck me most wasn’t just the terror, but the humanity. In a moment where everything could have fallen apart, ordinary people chose to hold onto one another.
That idea — that safety can come not just from walls, but from people — felt deeply personal.
Recently, I found myself at my cousin’s bat mitzvah — not in West Bloomfield, where so many of my childhood memories live, but somewhere else entirely. And in one of those moments, you almost don’t believe while it’s happening, I ran into an elementary school friend I hadn’t seen in 35 years — Haley.
It wasn’t hesitation. It wasn’t uncertainty.
It was instant.
Thirty-five years disappeared in a second.
We hadn’t spoken. We hadn’t stayed in touch. We had simply gone on to live completely separate lives — in different places, with different paths, different careers. And yet, somehow, in a random room, at a random moment, we were standing face to face again.
The odds of it felt almost impossible.
We grew up together in West Bloomfield — a place that always felt safe, familiar, insulated from the kind of fear we associated with somewhere else, somewhere far away.
But even that sense of safety has been shaken.
In West Bloomfield, a terrorist attack occurred at a local synagogue — a reminder that hatred and violence are not confined to one place. They can reach into our own communities, into the places we once believed were untouched.
Standing there at the bat mitzvah, reconnecting after more than three decades, it didn’t feel random anymore.
It felt like something else.
A reminder.
That even as the world becomes more uncertain, more fractured, more frightening — there are these moments of connection that break through. Moments that remind us who we are, where we come from, and how deeply we are all still tied to one another.
In my work, I’ve spent years focused on antisemitism and policies like sanctions related to Iran — issues that often felt abstract, geopolitical, and distant.
But October 7 changed that.
It made everything immediate. Personal. Impossible to hold at arm’s length.
Safe Room captures that shift. It shows how, in the face of unimaginable fear, people become each other’s refuge. It reminds us that a safe room is not just a place — it’s the act of standing together.
Today, more than ever, we need that kind of courage. We need to stand up against antisemitism, against hatred, and against the forces that seek to divide us.
And we need to tell these stories.
I urge you to see Safe Room when it is released in October. Not just as a film, but as a reminder of who we are — and who we must continue to be.
Because sometimes, the strongest safe room we have… is each other.
