29/07/2024
⚠️Trigger Warning: This post contains harsh content related to Hamas violent attack on October 7th 2023. Please proceed with caution if you feel this may be triggering for you.⚠️
Almost ten months have passed since the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. It was supposed to be a peaceful Sabbath, a Sabbath of a holiday. Instead, we woke up to the sound of sirens and explosions. From 6:30 in the morning and for several days, there were relentless rocket barrages targeting many areas in Israel.
But the wait in the protected room was not quiet. Like the messengers who came to Job, rumor after rumor, picture after picture, video after video began to appear on social media. At first, it seemed like a joke to me. But as time went on, it became clear that this was reality. However, the real shock came the next day when the horrors of October 7 began to be revealed. An army officer, a believer, who was called up for reserve duty on October 8, when he arrived at one of the kibbutzim near Gaza, described it as follows: "What happened yesterday in Israel is nothing less than a slaughter of biblical proportions. May God have mercy."
Last week, I joined an organized tour for guides to the Gaza Envelope – a 5 mile district in south-west Israel, bordering the Gaza strip. Until this opportunity, I avoided going there on my own because the very thought stirred so many mixed emotions. By the end of the tour, I felt as though I was walking through a living museum, Yad Vashem. Yet Yad Vashem is a museum that holds names, memorials, and information about a period that lasted several years, a period referred to in Hebrew as "the Shoah", the holocaust. Yad Vashem is a small area that tells the story of a relatively long period, one that is far in time from us (the 1930s and 1940s) and physically distant from Israel. The "living museum" in the Gaza Envelope area is the complete opposite. It spans a very wide area and does not preserve the memory of a long period, but of a single day—a day of Shoah, a day of holocaust—and close in time, as if everything happened yesterday and right here in Israel. The names and memorials are everywhere: the roads, the trees, the houses. And of course, the current reality is mixed with recent memory and the knowledge that there is still a war going on. That everyone knew or met someone who was murdered, the knowledge that there are still hostages held in Gaza, the knowledge that family members and friends are fighting inside Gaza, which is only a few miles away from where we were.
It is still hard to grasp the disaster. There are quite a few fundamental questions that remain unanswered. But for now, there is one aspect that is indisputable—the desire to commemorate the names of the murdered, to trace their last steps, and to pass on awe-inspiring stories of bravery and resourcefulness of people who faced cruel death to save others.
May their memory be blessed 🕯
