For Jews and Latter-day Saints alike, memory is never simple. It carries not only heritage and covenant, but also the weight of violence, exile and loss.
For Jews, that history stretches across millennia — expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust and, most recently, the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. That day, more than 1,200 Israelis, Americans and others were slaughtered or taken hostage, and in its aftermath the world has witnessed an alarming rise of antisemitic acts: vandalized synagogues, students harassed on campuses, mobs chanting slogans that once seemed confined to Nazi Germany.
Many Jews now feel a dread that recalls the darkest chapters of the 20th century. As Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, put it bluntly, antisemitism in America is “worse than at any point since the 1930s.”
More recently, Jewish leaders in New York compared rising harassment and intimidation to “the Nazi playbook come to life.” These warnings are not casual analogies; they are sobering judgments grounded in lived memory.
For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the story of persecution is also ever present: mobs in Missouri, the 1838 Extermination Order, the burning of homes, and the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at Carthage 180 years ago. These stories are not distant legends; they are the marrow of identity, passed from parent to child, shaping how communities see themselves in a world that is often unstable, sometimes hostile.
Yet memory has a danger. When told only as injury, it can harden into bitterness. If we transmit only grievance, the next generation may grow fragile, defensive, resentful.
But our traditions offer another path: remembrance as responsibility. We honor those lost not by indulging hatred or turning inward, but by carrying their witness forward with courage, with love, with commitment to speak.
That imperative feels painfully immediate today. In Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, a man drove a truck into a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, opened fire, set the building ablaze and killed multiple worshippers. Authorities are investigating the attack as targeted violence, citing the suspect’s long-harbored animosity toward the Church of Jesus Christ.
The assault has shaken the local congregation and reverberated across the nation. Yet their leaders, even amid rising sorrow, refused the posture of bitterness. They instead called for unity and hope. “We can find joy again,” Bishop Jeffrey Schaub told his ward, pointing them to Christ’s healing even in their grief.
For Jews, the same lesson has emerged from tragedy.
In a similar attack just days after the shooting in Blanc Township, Michigan, a man drove his car into the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Manchester, England. Two people were killed and another three injured in a stabbing rampage as members of the Jewish community gathered to pray on Yom Kippur.
The Joint Jewish Communal Statement on the attack comes at a time of “rising antisemitism” in the United Kingdom.
Sadly, the grief associated with these attacks is not new.
The wounds of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh — 11 worshippers slain while praying on Shabbat in 2018 — still run deep. And now, in the wake of Oct. 7 and the eruption of antisemitism it unleashed, Jewish parents and educators face the urgent task of preparing their children for a world where they may once again be maligned simply for being who they are.
At the University of Virginia, Jewish student leader Truman Brody-Boyd responded to Pittsburgh with a nationwide letter-writing campaign of solidarity. His instinct was not retreat but witness: a refusal to yield to fear, a determination to keep Jewish identity visible and proud.
These young voices matter. They show us that memory is not a weight but a foundation. Our role as elders is not simply to recite the tragedies, but to teach that violence never has the last word. That bitterness is not the only inheritance. That what begins in suffering can end in creation.
So, in these days when intolerance roars and darkness seems too near, what do we tell our youth?
We tell them: Your message matters more than ever. Tragedy is never the last chapter. Responsibility, dialogue, resilience must endure. Your faith should not shrink behind locked doors, it should enter the public square with dignity and grace. Your voice, when offered in forgiveness and hope, can heal divisions and light paths.
In Jewish and Latter-day Saint tradition, tragedy has been real but so has rebuilding. The blood of martyrs consecrated the ground, but the living chose to sow new beginnings. The deepest lesson is that faith survives not by hiding but by speaking; not by retreating but by building; not by despairing but by blessing the world. And so we trust our young people — to inherit memory, hope and love — and to carry them forward into a world that desperately needs both.
As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed” (Isaiah 54:10).
Resilience is not forgetting the pain, nor pretending it never happened. It is the choice to remember rightly; to let grief deepen conviction instead of hollowing it out.
It is the decision to rise when hatred strikes, to build again when destruction comes, to speak in public with dignity rather than hide in fear.
For Jews and for Latter-day Saints, that is the inheritance of our ancestors, the testimony of our martyrs and the covenant of our faith.
And it is what we tell our youth today: Tragedy does not define you, but your response does. To choose joy after sorrow, to choose faith after violence, to choose hope after despair. That is the strength that carries a people forward, and that is the strength the world most desperately needs now.