By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

In the weeks before our community’s commemoration of the Oct. 7 2023 attack on Israel, my colleagues at Federation were focused on preparing for what we knew would be a meaningful and well-attended event.

At the time, I was immersed in Israeli journalist Lee Yaron’s important new book, 10/7: 100 Human Stories in order to prepare some questions I’d be sending her in advance of the online program she would present for us in October. (You can read the interview here.) In this accomplished work of non-fiction, Yaron evokes the horrors of that day and, in doing so, also captures the polyglot character of Israeli society – Jewish but multicultural, and now united in trauma, grief, and defiance.

It is not an easy read. Yaron’s descriptions of Oct. 7 are vivid, graphic, and often jarringly blunt – you may be following the efforts of an individual to survive the massacre over the course of many pages, when suddenly his or her life is ended abruptly and the narrative shifts without ceremony to another harrowing storyline. 10/7 is more than “journalism as a first draft of history” – it is a work of literature that contains multitudes.

I was in the middle of Yaron’s description of the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri when our executive director handed me a printout of the remarks community member Shimi Rotches would be reading at our Oct. 7 commemoration. She asked me to give it an editorial once-over and see if I had any suggestions about flow, language, etc.

The Rotches’s extended family, who lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, lost members of three generations on the morning of Oct. 7 – brother-in-law Ohad, Ohad’s mother Yona, and the baby of the family, Mila. Sandra Cohen, the sister of Shimi’s wife Natali, was shot several times, but managed (along with her two sons) to be escape death.

Those of you who heard Shimi’s testimony at our community commemoration will not soon forget it. Those of you yet to experience what he had to share (you can read the transcript here) will no doubt find his story as shattering as I did when I first read it. I gave the draft back to our executive director with my editorial judgement: “Don’t change a word.”

When I returned to my office and continued reading Lee Yaron’s 10/7, the first paragraph I read – the first – was this one:

Nirit’s phone buzzed incessantly with calls from wounded friends unable to get medical attention. Among them was Sandra Cohen, a nurse herself, who reported the murder of her baby, Mila, not yet a year old. Her husband was severely injured, as was she; the terrorists had also tied up her mother-in-law, Yona, and murdered her. Three generations of the Cohen family were erased. [p. 170]

This unsettling coincidence reaffirmed what I believe has been the overarching lesson of Oct. 7 and its aftermath: We live in a small Jewish world and we are all connected by fewer degrees of separation than we ordinarily comprehend. After Oct. 7 and the worldwide mobilization of antisemitic forces, we have to look beyond the squabbles and apathies that mask our ability to recognize the smallness of our world and our interconnectedness within it.

But how to sustain that post-Oct. 7 awareness and continue to act upon it? It’s a problem. I lived in New York City on 9/11/2001, where 2,753 people were murdered in one morning by terrorists espousing the same worldview that impelled the Oct. 7 terrorists from Gaza to cross into Israel and perpetrate their abominable crimes. In the aftermath, we New Yorkers wept for our dead, raged at the murderers, participated in innumerable memorials, and constructed monuments to commemorate that day and its victims and heroes. Each year on September 11, we gather at the World Trade Center in the mornings to hear church bells tolling at the times both planes crashed and to read aloud the names of dead. After sunset, dramatic shafts of light beam into the night sky. Ground Zero, we asserted, would always be sacred ground!

Yet these days, thousands of protestors in the grip the same violent, hateful, and anti-human ideology as the men who flew airplanes into our buildings regularly march with impunity blocks away from the sacred ground of Ground Zero. The marchers could not be clearer about who they are, what they want, and the historical events that have pleased them. And I wonder – where are my notoriously plucky and outspoken New Yorkers? Where are those people I grieved with? Where has the clarity and righteous anger gone? Just over 23 years past – not so long ago. How and why, after 9/11, did things get worse for us?

Things can always get worse, I suppose, and things often do. So, the question again – how to sustain the present awareness of the interconnectedness our small Jewish world and continue acting upon it?

A thought: Keep on showing up. According to a national survey of 6,000 people earlier this year by Jewish Federations of North America, some 43% of American Jews say they are more engaged in Jewish life than before the Oct. 7 attacks.

So keep on showing up, and not only when it’s time to grieve. Do Jewish as you do Jewish – do American as you do American – but keep on showing up, understanding that Jewish now is not the same as Jewish was on October 6, 2023. Show up for your community, at a synagogue, for your kids inside your home, for online study, at your college alumni association, at a meeting of local government, and maybe even with a pro-Israel banner across the street from an antisemitic protest. Know that we are not as grasshoppers in the eyes our enemies – they recognize our formidability and the counterweight it poses to their achieving the world they desire.

Whatever else you might have to say about them, they show up. We are in the midst of a fight and we have to keep the pressure on them – and on ourselves, as well.