The news that four people had died in an apparent terrorist attack at Brussels’ Jewish museum hit me at the least expected time and place.

I was on the other end of the continent, in Chisinau, Moldova, getting ready to party with hundreds of Jews who were celebrating their country’s second Limmud FSU Jewish learning conference. The program has instantly become their small and impoverished community’s flagship event and testament to their attempt to be culturally revived in one of Europe’s most challenging settings.

For me, the news from Brussels drained me of any desire to partake in the Moldovans’ big day.

Brussels, you see, hit too close to home.

The city’s landscape, with its impressive Gothic architecture, was my first sight of Europe as a child, and my tight-knit clan of 20-odd fun-loving relatives keeps me returning regularly for Jewish holidays full of laughs, alcohol and raucous singing.

And while I generally prefer Dutch society’s simpler charms to Belgium’s many cultural pretensions and social intricacies, it is the Brussels Jewish museum that I visit each year on European Day of Jewish Culture for lectures and events full of humor and rich historical detail.

After a quick Facebook scan to see my family was okay, I immersed myself in the horror that transpired at the entrance to that museum. Each of the four victims received two to five bullets to the neck and head from a shooter who moved quickly and silently, with efficiency that suggested determination and training, I learned from an anguishing talk with a counterterrorism expert.

Speaking in a hushed but determined voice that I recognized from people in my native Israel, a Brussels Jewish mother whom I’d interviewed about her children’s Jewish school invited me to a movie screening about the Holocaust, which she said would turn into a town hall meeting for the community and a vigil for the dead — a testament to this community’s resilience and familiarity with terrorist attacks.

And in a telephone conversation with the indefatigable Joel Rubinfeld — one of Belgian Jewry’s most prominent representatives – I heard anger at what he believes is a failure by Belgium’s deeply divided society and government to mount serious opposition to the growing problem of anti-Semitism which he says is slowly emptying the country of its Jews.

Yet even as I was making sense of this portrait of a community in decline, I found myself tapping my foot to the songs of renewal being sung around me in Chisinau – a city whose pre-Holocaust population was 50 percent Jewish and that remains one of the great symbols of the Nazi attempt to wipe out European Jewry.

Unaware of the unfolding drama in Brussels, young Moldovans and Israelis were singing “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu”: “Someday Peace will Come upon Us.”

Cnaan Liphshiz is JTA’s news and features correspondent in Europe. Based in the Netherlands, he covers the mosaic of cultures, languages and traditions that is European Jewry. Born in Israel, he used to work as foreign news editor for Ma’ariv and as a reporter for Haaretz.