When several hundred people gathered on Sunday evening at the French Embassy in Washington for the Capital Jewish Museum’s second annual gala, they did so in service of a simple theme: “preserving history and building bridges.”

That message was particularly resonant as the evening’s honorees and organizers paid tribute to a tragic moment in recent history that will be part of the story of Washington’s Jewish community forever: the murder of Israeli Embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the museum in May.

“It was a horrific, brazen act of antisemitic violence, a wrenching reminder of the importance of what the museum does every day of its existence and the fact that it collects artifacts, but it is a living, breathing place for a viable Jewish community to go, and that’s what was happening that day,” CNN anchor Dana Bash, who emceed the gala, said at the start of the event, as she introduced a moment of silence for Milgrim and Lischinsky. 

The Capital Jewish Museum opened in downtown Washington in 2023 with a commitment to teaching the history of the District’s local Jewish community, in the context of the city’s unique role as a nexus for civic-minded Americans. Speakers throughout the evening, including Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, touted the diversity and warmth of Washington while taking not-so-subtle jabs at President Donald Trump’s recent takeover of the city’s police force. 

“You know that the real D.C. is 700,000 people that actually live here, go to work, raise their families and are tax-paying Americans,” Bowser said. “While we are diverse, we are also a connected city, and so we know in our honorees tonight that they have followed their faith [and] invested in their families, their city and their nation.” 

The Sunday evening gala honored the investor and philanthropist David Rubenstein and Esther Safran Foer, the former longtime CEO of Sixth & I Synagogue and the Capital Jewish Museum’s founding board president. The two were asked, in conversation with Bash, where each traces their love of history.

For Rubenstein, the co-founder of the private equity giant Carlyle, who has supported major American institutions like the National Archives and the Kennedy Center, the answer was a sixth grade teacher who encouraged him to watch President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, sparking a lifelong love of American history. He used historical reference points — immigration quotas from 1915 and the doomed voyage of the MS St. Louis, a European ship with Jewish refugees on board that was turned away by the U.S. — to bemoan antisemitism as “at a level I’ve never seen before in my lifetime.” 

Foer described a lifelong search for answers about her family’s story in Ukraine, which they fled after the Holocaust. She detailed that quest in her 2020 memoir, I Want You To Know We’re Still Here. 

“Pulling together the family history and the context of the history of the times has been kind of a lifelong obsession for me,” said Foer, who was born in Poland in a displaced persons camp soon after World War II ended. 

“My background is a Holocaust background, but when I wrote my book and I was working on the title, my working title was, ‘I Want You To Know We’re Still Here,’ and it ultimately became a title, because that’s our story. The Holocaust happened at a terrible time, a terrible place, but there’s a vibrant Jewish life here, in other countries. We need to celebrate that, and a museum is a way to celebrate that, to keep telling the stories.”