High Holidays 2026

Before I start: TOI doesn’t collect statistics on the blog, so I don’t know how many people are actually reading this. I would truly appreciate it if you would leave a comment or a Like so I can see you are there. Grateful for each pair of eyes.

I sat in synagogue on Rosh HaShana, the second day when the shofar was blown, right at the beginning of the fall holiday season. The words of the prayer ונתנה תוקף (Unetaneh Tokef) held my attention.

Who could not pay attention to these words, remembering that three years ago we sat through them in ignorance of what was to come at the end of the holiday season? Who could have imagined how many would live the downside: by fire, by water, by famine, by strangling, by torment (to pick just a few).

That day when it started – started but didn’t end – should have been a day of joy and celebration, Simchat Torah. Instead by 8:00 in the morning, we knew it was not going to be like that. We sat, the religious and the non-religious, the whole people here in Israel and abroad, and watched and listened as hell broke loose from Gaza upon us. Then we watched as our spouses, children, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues went to fight. Went and didn’t come back for weeks and months. We watched this from our safe rooms and our bomb shelters, from our living rooms as we anticipated the next siren. Some left their homes and spent months in temporary places waiting for the day they could go home. Some could not go home; some would never go home again. Some would wait months and years till we were able to bring them home from a horror I can’t imagine. Some would go home but not the way they left that morning, deeply hurt in their bodies and souls.

Three years have passed. Some of us have been deep in the pain of the aftermath of those first few hours, or of the days and weeks that came afterwards. Not just the one day, but the years since have left their mark on all of us who have lived through them. (I speak only of us, not of the haters who began their “genocide” claims on 8 October before Israel had even begun to respond.)

You think the memory will never pass and that we will never forget. “Never again” on every lip?

It ain’t true. “Never again” the Holocaust – but Holocaust deniers are a penny a dozen. 9/11 is just a short 25 years ago and the young people of America don’t know who did what to whom. They are prepared to believe that the US government or Israel conspired to bring down the World Trade Center. History is being rewritten deliberately on the Internet, in the media, by “Influencers” whose ignorance is no bar to their growing audiences.

So I sat in synagogue and the words of the prayer did not pass me by as they might have in the past. They seared my soul. And now I ask you to remember, to pass it on to your children. To say “I was there, I remember what we heard and saw, I remember ….”

יהי זכרם ברוך   – May their memories be for a blessing.

And for a memory.

[1] Translation courtesy of Claude