The week that began with a sickening display of anti-Semitic violence ended resonantly with what the AJC says was the largest-ever showing of solidarity in prayer with the Jewish people. There has also been a notable level of support for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, given its tragic connection to the shootings in Pittsburgh—the gunman invoked the refugee-resettlement agency and said it was bringing in “invaders” minutes before he set off on a rampage that left 11 dead.

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Melanie Nezer, HIAS’s senior vice president of public affairs, said the organization caught the public’s attention last year after strongly protesting the Trump administration’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, as well as other efforts to bar immigrants and refugees from entering the United States. But that support has paled in comparison to the wellspring of donations, notes, and volunteers in what has been the greatest expression of support for HIAS in at least the past few decades. “All of these new people that have shown their faith and trust in us—we intend to honor that through our work,” Nezer told me.

Only once before in American history had such a large gathering occurred in a time of Jewish crisis. Two days before Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1987 White House visit, more than 250,000 American Jews and allies gathered on the National Mall—just blocks from Sixth & I—to protest the treatment of Jews barricaded in the U.S.S.R. The demonstrators wanted Russia to allow its Jewish people to leave so that they, too, could have the chance to come to America. The movement’s ethos was in its name: Freedom Sunday for Soviet Jews.

When Soviet Jews were given permission to emigrate shortly after the march, it was HIAS that helped so many of them embrace that ethos of freedom in the United States.

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Ken Jacobson, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, was at Freedom Sunday 30 years ago. But the turnout at Sixth & I in the wake of the Pittsburgh shootings brought to mind a more recent outpouring. “It reminds me a little bit more of 9/11,” he told me. “I thought of how people had an emotional and religious need to express themselves after the terrible tragedy. All the synagogues, all the churches and mosques—everything was mobbed. On the Shabbat after that, there wasn’t even a call for anything, people just gravitated to it.”

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks weren’t tied to Judaism “at all,” Jacobson said. But the importance of religion as a base of consolation and community in times of both tragedy and peace, he said, is crucial to our social fabric in the United States.

“Thank God, Jewish life in America for the last 50, 60 years has been a pretty secure and stable one,” Jacobson said—so much so that some have at times questioned whether the Anti-Defamation League’s vigilance in monitoring and combating anti-Semitism is still relevant. “Obviously after Pittsburgh, that whole chapter is long past now,” he says. “No one would dare say that anti-Semitism isn’t relevant.”