This essay is excerpted and adapted from People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.

Consolation is scarce in the worst of times, but Hadassah, through its life-saving mission, enables us to do more than grieve.

This year the task of remembering the departed is particularly fraught as 12 people on the list were lost to acts of violence in U.S. synagogues.

According to the ADL report, the last three months of 2018 were “unusually active” in terms of incidents.

The Poway attack, which took place six months to the day after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, is being treated as a hate crime.

Gilbert-Kaye, a member of the Bat Harim group of Hadassah San Diego, jumped in front of the Chabad synagogue’s rabbi, protecting him from the gunman’s bullets.