A community center for gay and lesbian youths reopened on Monday, two days after it was the scene of a deadly shooting that left two dead and 15 wounded.

Mike Hamel, the head of the Aguda, Israel’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) organization, said “for so many years this place was home for so many people. This was the only place where you could feel at home, but now it feels that this place has been defiled.”

Hamel said it is very important for him to return the center to its condition before the shooting, but added “I don’t know if I want kids to come back to a place that has bullets in the wall.”

On Sunday evening, hundreds of people attended the separate funerals of Nir Katz, 26, and Liz Trobishi, 16, who died Saturday when a masked man walked into the gay center and began firing in all directions.

Katz, 26, was buried in Modi’in. His sister, Chen, who had lived with him for the last seven months, arrived with a gay pride flag, which she placed on his grave at the end of the funeral.

It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!

We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.

This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions. 

We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.

As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday! 

Don't just read the Forward - invest in it. Make a gift and our board will match it.

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$129 $180 $360 OTHER AMOUNT