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Michigan bishop, Great Lakes standing committee respond to synagogue attack

March 13, 2026

[Episcopal News Service] Episcopal leaders in the dioceses of Michigan and the Great Lakes released pastoral messages expressing “outrage and sadness” and calling for prayers in response to the March 12 attack at Temple Israel in a suburb of Detroit. The perpetrator is dead and one security guard is injured but expected to recover. “I write to share my outrage and sadness over the attack of our siblings at Temple Israel, West Bloomfield Township. No community should have to endure the pain, panic and fear that they experienced today,” Michigan Bishop Bonnie A. Perry said in a March 12 statement. “We stand in solidarity with our neighbors and friends at Temple Israel and the wider Jewish community.” Shortly after noon Eastern, a 41-year-old man from Dearborn Heights rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel, the second-largest Reform Jewish synagogue in the United States with more than 12,000 members. He then reportedly opened fire with a rifle from inside his vehicle and was killed by security guards. The FBI is leading the investigation. One hundred forty children attending an early childhood center at Temple Israel, teachers and staff were inside the synagogue when the attack occurred. “Although yesterday’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield did not result in the death of any of the children, staff or congregants present, the terror, trauma and grief it brings will shape that community for years to come,” the Diocese of the Great Lakes Standing Committee’s co-presidents, the Rev. Derek J. Quinn and Ellen Schrader, said in their March 13 statement. The attacker was a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen. No motive has been confirmed. Four of his relatives, including a sibling, were recently killed by an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon amid the widening war in the Middle East since the United States and Israel began launching a series of attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. “Further from home, and yet no less heavy on our minds, and in our hearts, yesterday’s events occur against a backdrop of war in Iran and across southwest Asia, violence and conflict in Israel-Palestine, rising tensions at home and a pervasive sense that the ground beneath us is unstable,” Quinn and Schrader said. “The complexity and pain of our current moment leads us to call out to God for strength, for compassion, for mercy.” Quinn and Schrader noted in their joint statement that the attack on Temple Israel occurred nearly six months after a similar attack occurred at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Bland Blanc Township, a suburb of Flint. That attack left five people dead, including the perpetrator, and nine others injured. Quinn and Schrader also lamented that Jewish people have “endured millennia of persecution – from ancient exile to the Holocaust, from systemic discrimination and oppression to ongoing antisemitic attacks – and we acknowledge that the church has participated in this discrimination and violence for far too many centuries.” Perry, a co-convener of the Bishops United Against Gun Violence network, said the Diocese of Michigan will continue working towards ending gun violence in the state. “All houses of worship must be sanctuaries, not targets. …When violence enters a place of prayer and learning, it wounds not only those present but our whole human family.” The diocesan leaders called on Episcopalians to support local Jewish communities, and they called for prayers in the attack’s aftermath. “In moments like these, prayer reminds us that we do not face fear or grief alone,” Perry said. “May our Jewish siblings, our neighbors, our communities and all of us in this troubled world be surrounded by God’s compassionate care.”