We must reclaim our Judaism, our Zionism, our pro-Israelism and carry it high on our shoulders, brilliantly into the future.
Sarah N. Stern
Oct. 7 was a gut-wrenching day in Israel. By now, practically every Israeli adult has witnessed the magnitude of the crime and how it has left a gigantic scar on this tiny nation, reeling from one war after another.
Families have been shattered. In one provocative scene in the 2024 film “Pogrom(s)” by Pierre Rehov, viewers recognize what that day actually was: a modern-day glimpse of the Holocaust. Men and women shot randomly, and in groups. A little boy screaming at a Hamas terrorist, “You murdered my sister!” he cries.
He knew he was next.
Children were killed next to grieving parents. Parents had anatomical parts removed from them next to crying children. Couples were found dead, tied together. Nova music festival-goers who were planning on a day of dancing and socializing wound up under the barren terror tunnels deep beneath the Gaza Strip—hungry, thirsty, starving, tortured, raped and, in many instances, dead.
Many attendees of the Nova festival had stayed up to witness the sunrise. Then, at 6:30 a.m., the sky became alight with rockets. Some thought it was a light show or fireworks. At approximately 7 a.m., the siren went off: “Tzeva Adom, Tzeva Adom” (Red Alert, Red Alert).
Armed terrorists from the Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and ordinary Palestinians—some suited up in military fatigues, using paragliders, motorcycles and trucks surrounded the Nova participants, firing indiscriminately on individuals attempting to flee.
But there were few places to run. Women hid in bathrooms, which almost uniformly became their coffins. Garbage dumps, bus stops, cars. Nothing was immune.
Women were raped, again and again, screaming into the air.
And then there was a brutal silence.
Some 1,200 men, women and children were left dead. Another 251 were dragged across the border to Gaza.
Both men and women were taken as sex slaves; some for days, weeks, months, even up to two years before they were freed.
The beautiful Bibas boys—Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months—and their mother Shira, 33, were murdered by the hands of Hamas. The father, Yarden, spent 484 days in hell beneath Gaza, before being freed on Feb. 1, 2025.
At Re’im, the site of the Nova festival, one sees row after row of pictures of young people murdered, each one with so much potential to live up to.
The civilized world must remember these brutal, savage scenes.
What sort of propaganda can turn human beings into absolute barbarians?
Throngs of intellectual sheep on college campuses across the United States, Canada and Western Europe believe the antisemitic tropes mouthed by their professors about Zionists, Israelis and Jews. This was before the Israeli army even entered Gaza to get back its hostages.
All of this is recycled in an echo chamber, mouthed by articulate academicians and repeated in the media, as though it is fact. And then it is mouthed by literally millions of useful idiots.
The empathy the world showed the Israeli people—the Jews—after Oct. 7 lasted barely a day.
We quickly realized that there was very little empathy for the tremendous losses our people had suffered, the most since the Holocaust. And Jews worldwide awoke on Oct. 8 to the realization that we are few in number, with even fewer friends in the community of nations.
We must remember that 6,000 Gazans invaded a border to do nothing more than maim and murder Israeli citizens. Indeed, they flooded it, codenaming it the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
We came back to our ancient homeland to rebuild, to invent, to design and to create.
We must reclaim our Judaism, our Zionism, our pro-Israelism and carry it high on our shoulders, brilliantly into the future.
And we must never forget.
**Originally posted on JNS and republished here with author’s consent.
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