BOULDER, Colo. — One year after a man threw Molotov cocktails at a group of people peacefully demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages along the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, one survivor is looking ahead.
Rachelle Halpern was protesting for the release of Israeli hostages when the attack happened. 12 people hurt, and an 82-year-old woman died from her injuries weeks later.
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In the days following the attack, a chaplain asked Halpern a simple question: "What is your word for the day?"
"My word was transformation, because I realized that I cannot be the same person anymore," Halpern said.
Two weeks later, she was asked the same question. Her answer had changed.
"And that word came up courage," Halpern said. "Transformation happens, courage, courage, we need to practice."
That word — courage — is now written on her wrist. One year after the attack, it serves as a daily reminder of what the Jewish community needs for the days ahead.
"It takes courage not to be silent," Halpern said.
She is no stranger to hatred directed at the Jewish community. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and she grew up in Poland.
Halpern calls the attack along the Pearl Street Mall "monstrous." She still remembers the face of the man who carried it out.
"The last face I remember, it was like a face that was really, really angry," Halpern said.
That anger is what the Jewish community is pushing back against, according to Rabbi Charna Rosenholtz, president of the Haver Boulder Council of Rabbis and Cantors.
"Love is what matters," Rosenholtz said.
Rosenholtz has been a rabbi for five and a half years, and she said her role is evolving in the current climate.
"There's a lot more anxiety, a lot more tension, and so there has to be pastoral care to go with that,to sit with people, to hold people, to try and bring comfort," Rosenholtz said.
When asked whether she feels safe being part of the Jewish community, Rosenholtz pointed to a collective resolve.
"The Jewish response as a whole is be educated, be prepared, live your life," Rosenholtz said.
That is the path forward for Halpern as well — finding courage every day to be open about her identity and her beliefs.
"There are so many people that I know that started hiding their Jewishness," Halpern said. "In this country, in this place, it's just totally unacceptable that we would have to do that."
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