Dozens of people moved in and out of a large white tent behind an education center Sunday evening, taking time before another workweek to remember civilians and soldiers killed during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in Israel one year ago.

Candles lined long tables in the tent at the Aish HaTorah Detroit on Coolidge Highway, 1,186, one for each of the lives lost that day, said Rabbi Simcha Tolwin.

The gathering, which began with a prayer at 6 p.m. and families and others stopping by to light candles, which flickered throughout the evening, was more than a memorial, said Noam Miller, 34, who works engaging with young families at Aish HaTorah. It is a call to action.

Before lighting a candle, each person received a card with the name of someone who was killed Oct. 7, as well as their age and information about their life and how it ended.

“It’s not just about coming together and lighting a candle and walking out,” said Miller, who lives in Huntington Woods. “Do an act of kindness, share the story, there has to be an action.”

Fears about the fighting turning into a region-wide war have heightened across communities. It has been “an enormously difficult year” because the acrimony has spread to the United States, said Jordan Acker, a University of Michigan regent and resident of Huntington Woods.

Talks about a cease-fire in Gaza have bogged down as the Biden administration continues to send military aid to Israel despite domestic and international pressure in the past year. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued the Israeli assault on Gaza with plans to eradicate Hamas as his Cabinet pushes for total occupation of the Gaza strip to guard against future Hamas attacks.

The Oct. 7 attack and the days immediately after it were painful moments for Merci Decker, 42, of Detroit. Decker is a member of a local chapter of If Not Now, a self-described movement of American Jews seeking an end to Israeli apartheid over the occupied territory and equality for Palestinians and Israelis. None of her family members live in Israel, but many people in her network have friends and family who live there, she said.

The first two weeks after the attack and Israel’s bombing of Gaza were painful to witness from Michigan, Decker said.

“Like it just hurt so much … just the loss of life, just felt painful, both the bombing of Gaza as well as the Israelis,” she said. “When it first happened, I think everybody was reeling because everybody had a different experience.”

Decker said she has grounded herself in her own Jewish community at Ferndale’s Congregation T’Chiyah in the year since. Decker said the war and its costs have cast a shadow over her plans to observe the Jewish High Holidays.

“Coming up on a new year, it’s like, more lives continue to be lost,” Decker said. “But also, hope, because you have to have hope. You have to believe that it’s going to get better.”

‘It could have been any of our kids’

The Hamas militants attacked the open-air Tribe of Nova music festival, among other locations, making it what is believed to be the worst civilian massacre in Israeli history with at least 260 dead.

The young people at the Supernova music festival “could’ve been any of us; it could’ve been any of our kids,” Acker said.

“To have this happen and unleash a wave of antisemitic incidents is deeply disturbing,” he said.

In mid-May, pro-Palestinian demonstrators targeted the homes of UM regents, taping a long list of demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel on their doors, including that of Acker’s Huntington Woods’ house. In a thread on X, Acker wrote on May 15 that “around 4:40 a.m., a masked intruder came to the door of my family’s home with a list of demands, including defunding the police.”

“My three daughters were asleep in their beds, and thankfully unaware of what transpired,” Acker said. “This form of protest is not peaceful. Public officials should not be subject to this sort of intimidating conduct, and this behavior is unacceptable from any Michigan community member, especially one led by someone who called for the death of people they disagree with.”

College campuses in particular have been a hub for post-Oct. 7 reaction, said Carolyn Normandin, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Michigan office.

“We have released a report card of antisemitic incidents, looking at campus acrimony,” she said. “It has been very, very high this year.”

In the months following the Hamas attacks, pro-Palestinian encampments calling for academic divestment from companies with Israel were reportedly formed on at least 80 campuses across the U.S., including at the University of Michigan, where 11 participants have since been charged with crimes, such as interfering with demonstrators, attempted ethnic intimidation and malicious destruction of property. There were also encampments at Michigan State and Wayne State universities.

“My three daughters were asleep in their beds, and thankfully unaware of what transpired,” Acker said. “This form of protest is not peaceful. Public officials should not be subject to this sort of intimidating conduct, and this behavior is unacceptable from any Michigan community member, especially one led by someone who called for the death of people they disagree with.”

College campuses in particular have been a hub for post-Oct. 7 reaction, said Carolyn Normandin, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Michigan office.

“We have released a report card of antisemitic incidents, looking at campus acrimony,” she said. “It has been very, very high this year.”

In the months following the Hamas attacks, pro-Palestinian encampments calling for academic divestment from companies with Israel were reportedly formed on at least 80 campuses across the U.S., including at the University of Michigan, where 11 participants have since been charged with crimes, such as interfering with demonstrators, attempted ethnic intimidation and malicious destruction of property. There were also encampments at Michigan State and Wayne State universities.

Normandin said the ADL of Michigan is making progress on that front.

“At Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, all three presidents have made a clear, demonstrative change in the way antisemitism is treated on campus, clearly laying out guidelines and following those guidelines,” she said.

ADL data shows that nationally, there were 5,204 incidents determined to have involved antisemitic harassment, vandalism or assault in the U.S. between Oct. 7, 2023, and the end of the calendar year. That was more than the 3,698 such incidents for all of 2022.

Howard Lupovitch, director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies, said anti-Jewish sentiment is still strong.

“For Jews in America and for Jews in Israel and really for Jews around the world, this is one of the most difficult moments in history,” Lupovitch said.

Normandin’s also been “disturbed” by a trend of anti-Israeli Americans using the term “Zionist” as a pejorative.

“Being a Zionist does not mean a person supports every position of Israel,” she said. “I am a Zionist, and I support a two-state solution” — referring to the idea of resolving the Palestinian-Israel conflict by keeping Israel for Jewish people and a Palestinian area for Palestinians.

In the wake of the Hamas attack, the ADL updated its methodology to include “anti-Israel activism that incorporated expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism or attacks on Jews, Israelis or Zionists,” according to its website.

Muslims see impact

Sustained scrutiny over religious groups associated with the conflict has also endangered Muslims living in Metro Detroit in the year since Oct. 7, said Dawud Walid, executive director for the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“We have had an increase in anti-Muslim complaints linked to anti-Muslim bigotry since Oct. 7 that we haven’t seen since directly after 9/11,” Walid said.

Many anti-Muslim incidents that CAIR-MI has recently investigated were also reported on academic campuses, he said. Walid was also concerned by a Florida man’s Islamophobic death threats to CAIR-MI officials, he said. Michael Shapiro of West Palm Beach has been indicted.

“Oct. 7 had a very direct effect on the uptick of our work,” Walid said. “And until there is a cease-fire and some sense of peace that is taking place, we believe that the increase of anti-Muslim bigotry here in our state is going to continue.”

The death toll is deeply personal to Khalid Turaani, a Palestinian American of West Bloomfield. He said he has a friend who is the sole survivor of his family. He was away from home pursuing a degree in computer science when his family was killed in a bombing of their home.

“To me these numbers are real,” said Turaani, the executive director of CAIR-Ohio. “They are real human beings. Having been to Gaza several times, just looking at the streets and the unbelievable destruction that has been done to Gaza, it is really painful.”

He cautioned against seeing Oct. 7 as the start of the conflict between Hamas and Israel. He said observers must look back on the decades since Israel’s founding, including the “very brutal occupation” of Palestinian territory that “dehumanizes Palestinians, that dispossesses Palestinians of property and dignity and everything that allows them a normal life.”

While he said more Americans are recognizing the role the U.S. plays in supporting Israel through weapons transfers, he fears people will lose their sense of outrage as the conflict continues.

Some leaders in the Jewish community in Michigan said as the war escalates, their immediate hope is for the release of the 97 hostages being held by Hamas.

“We have to get the hostages home,” Normandin said. “And if they’ve been murdered, we have to get their bodies back to Israel.”

Bruce Miller, a lawyer from Oakland County, said wars are messy, civilian casualties are an unfortunate result and the best way to end civilian casualties is to let Israel pursue victory over Hamas and Hezbollah.

“If people want to stop the civilian casualties, stop interfering with the Israeli military and get it over with,” Miller said, referring to pressure from the international community and U.S. government for a cease-fire. “All these things just postpone things for another day, and we get more casualties.”

Lupovitch, the WSU professor, is hopeful the combatants can agree to a cease-fire, though he said returning to a “pre-Oct. 7 status quo” is not a sensible option.

“Hamas is an organization that has been violent all along,” he said. “They really can’t stay in Gaza or in the West Bank. That would be an obstruction to peace of any kind.”