After their synagogue is attacked, a tight-knit Jewish community vows to keep coming together

By Ray Sanchez, CNN

(CNN) — A Torah scroll removed from Temple Israel outside Detroit — where a driver rammed an explosives-laden truck and opened fire — was lifted up at Friday’s Shabbat service across the street in a makeshift sanctuary for one of the nation’s largest Reform houses of worship.

Rabbi Jennifer Kaluzny was in tears as she held one of the sacred scrolls removed from the West Bloomfield Township synagogue, where the grounds were sealed off with crime scene tape and heavy barricades one day after Thursday’s attack.

“We’re keeping one of them with us during services so everyone can see it,” she told CNN. “Our traditions live… We’re going to keep celebrating Shabbat. We may need security but we need to keep coming together and supporting each other.”

On the first Jewish Sabbath since the attack, many in the Temple Israel community — about 3,500 families, or more than 12,000 members, according to its website — gathered in a hall at the sprawling Shenandoah Country Club, which was founded by Chaldean Iraqi immigrants escaping persecution.

“The place that so many of us call home, Temple Israel, became the site of something frightening and painful, an act of violence that was meant to shake us in our sense of safety and belonging,” Cantor Neil Michaels said at the Friday night service.

“And yet, tonight, we gather… When the world feels uncertain, we come closer. When fears try to scatter us, we build community.”

Temple Israel includes a nursery school and a religious school for children in pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, according to its website.

There were more than 100 young children at the school in a separate part of the building at the time of the attack, which was stopped when guards opened fire on the truck that drove through the front doors and down a hallway, authorities said. The attacker died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the FBI said Friday.

One guard was injured, and dozens of first responders were treated for smoke inhalation after the truck caught fire in what the FBI called a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” But all the children and teachers inside the heavily-guarded temple and school were safe.

The attack was among four acts of violence that rattled America in recent weeks.

In a powerful sign of interfaith solidarity and cultural recognition from a community with a common history of displacement and resilience, members of the Chaldean country club across the street opened their doors to the Jewish congregation in a time of crisis, providing a safe haven as well as a command and reunification center for families.

“When the children finally started coming over, I really understood why the Jews and the Chaldeans get along so well, because the first thing that they did was bring out food for the children,” Temple Israel Rabbi Paul Yedwab said.

He added, “We all knew that this was the only place that this service could be tonight.”

Children sing as teachers shield them from attack

Rabbi Kaluzny was among those greeting anxious parents arriving at the country club after the attack.

“We just kept bringing parents literally into our arms,” she said. “We had parents coming out of the woods, coming down the streets, running for their children, screaming some of them, others almost blank in affect.”

The children were rushed out and locked down in a neighbor’s garage, where they sang a version of “The wheels on the bus” about traveling to synagogue, lighting candles and celebrating the end of the week, according to Kaluzny.

“The challah on the table goes break, break, break, all through the town. The people on the bus say ‘Shabbat Shalom,’ all through the town,” the song goes.

Rabbi Arianna Gordon described hunkering down in her office with members of the education team amid heavy smoke and bursts of gunfire. She recalled holding toddlers on her lap in the neighbor’s garage.

“I am so incredibly proud of our teachers,” she said. “We have all undergone security training and not a single teacher froze in the face of this crisis. They did exactly what they had been trained to do. They kept every one of our students calm and safe in this moment of horrific danger.”

Employees at the synagogue had taken an active shooter prevention training class just weeks earlier, and the building had bollards around it in an attempt to slow a ramming attack.

“That preparedness is not unwarranted. There’s a real threat, unfortunately, and I think it really got put to its tests,” Evan Sherman, a guitarist with the synagogue’s music team, told CNN before the service. “The sad thing is just the state of affairs and how this is necessary in the first place.”

Rabbi Gordon said teachers and other staffers arrived at the country club coughing and breathing heavily but quickly turned their attention to “screaming” and “catatonic” parents asking about their children. Some children separated M&M’s into clusters of different colors on the floor of Shenandoah Country Club. They munched on chicken nuggets as they waited for their parents.

At the start of the Jewish Sabbath, a time of rest and rituals and the recitation of blessings over wine and bread, Rabbi Yedwab called the events of the previous day “a miracle” that evoked the biblical story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Like them, he suggested, the members of Temple Israel have been safely freed. “You don’t ignore a miracle when it comes into your life,” Yedwab said.

“There were 106 children over there and, for a very long time, there were only four classrooms of children here,” he said of the reunification center, his voice filled with emotion. “And we had no idea… The only thought that kept coming to my head is, how many little funerals are we going to have to do?”

The Temple Israel sanctuary is defined by its members, not the building damaged by smoke and fire across the street, the rabbi said. For now, there is no ark housing the Torah scrolls. “Those beautiful prayer books,” Yedwab said, “they’re all destroyed.”

“What you have proven to us is that our sanctuary is not a building,” he said. “It’s you. It’s us. We are Temple Israel. You are Temple Israel. And so we are going to rise.”

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CNN’s Emma Tucker, Elizabeth Wolfe, Hannah Rabinowitz, Holmes Lybrand, Holly Yan, Eric Levenson and Dianne Gallagher contributed to this report.