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My Hometown in Michigan Is Under Attack. I’m in a Bomb Shelter in Israel.
Polina Fradkin
March 12, 2026

My entire community back home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is on lockdown. I’m 5,000 miles away, sheltering from Iranian rockets in a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv. Perhaps it sounds strange to say, but I feel safer here. At 12:59 p.m. ET, I see a text in my family group chat: Just a few miles from my childhood home, Temple Israel, the biggest synagogue in Michigan and the largest Reform congregation in North America, is under attack. A shooter has rammed his truck into the synagogue. He drove his vehicle down a hallway before he was killed during a firefight—either by a guard’s bullet or because his car caught alight. The images start flooding my phone. I have never seen so many police cars in my life. My 11-year-old brother is home, writes my mom, but his Jewish school, Hillel Day School, is just a five-minute drive from the site, and on lockdown. So is the high school I went to, the Jewish Community Center, and all other synagogues in the metro Detroit area. READ MORE

NEW YORK POST Would-be Michigan car bomber rammed explosives-laden truck into Temple Israel preschool — before security guards shot him dead An armed wannabe car bomber plowed a vehicle loaded with explosives into the preschool of a Michigan synagogue Thursday in a “targeted attack on the Jewish community,” investigators said. A vehicle registered to a Lebanon-born US citizen smashed through the doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield just before 1 p.m. and sped through the building housing 140 students, according to cops and reports.  Heroic security guards opened fire and stopped the driver, who died at the scene, Oakland Sheriff Mike Bouchard told reporters. The unidentified driver — found dead inside the car and burned beyond recognition — was armed with a rifle, and mortar shells were discovered in the vehicle’s rear, sources told The Post. The vehicle at the center of the attack is registered to a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon who lives in Dearborn, Michigan…