Nearly two thousand years ago, Roman soldiers erected an arch in the heart of their capital to commemorate the destruction of the Second Temple. Carved into its stone is a procession of captured treasures, most famously the menorah, carried through the streets of Rome as a trophy of Jewish defeat. The Arch of Titus was built to declare an ending. It was meant to be the final word on the Jewish people, a monument to our disappearance from history.

Rome, of course, no longer rules anything. The empire that commissioned that arch to mark our destruction exists now only in textbooks and tourist guides. The menorah, meanwhile, was chosen decades ago as the emblem of the modern State of Israel and stands today outside the Knesset in Jerusalem. The people that arch declared conquered are still here, still building schools, still raising children, still gathering in Jewish community centers across the world, including our J in Dallas.

I stood in front of that arch myself during a recent trip to Rome, and I will admit it affected me more than I expected. I have seen photographs of it for years, but standing beneath the carved image of our menorah being carried off as plunder was a different experience entirely. I found myself thinking not only about the ancient world, but about the world we are living in right now, one in which antisemitism is rising in ways many of us did not expect to confront again in our lifetimes. On campuses, in city streets, across social media, and in acts of violence far too close to home, the oldest hatred has resurfaced in new forms while carrying the same old intent. Standing there in the Roman sun, looking up at a monument built to celebrate our destruction, I did not feel despair. I felt something closer to defiance, because I was standing there, in the present tense, and the empire that built that arch was not.

History offers us a lesson if we look closely enough. Every empire, ideology, and movement that has set out to erase the Jewish people has failed, and failed completely, while the Jewish people endured. Not because the threats were not real or the losses not devastating, but because Jewish communities have always understood something their adversaries did not: survival requires building institutions, not simply enduring hardship. The arch that was meant to mark our end has instead become, through the strange irony of history, a monument to our persistence.

This is the work of the Aaron Family JCC, and I do not say that lightly. Every family that walks through our doors, every child in our preschool, every senior in our programming, every member who renews out of commitment rather than habit is part of the same continuity that has carried this people through Rome, through every empire since, and through every wave of hatred that has risen against us. In a moment when so much can feel uncertain, this building and this community remain something solid to stand on.

I do not offer this as comfort alone. I offer it as a call to action. The strength of this community depends on all of us choosing, again and again, to show up, to invest, and to build. That is what has always outlasted the arches built to mark our end.