Thursday morning chill

Waking up on Thursday, February 20 in America, and turning on Israeli News Channel i24, we viewed the grim reality of the return of the bodies of kidnapped Israeli mother Shiri Bibas and her two young children Kfir and Ariel. We shared WhatsApp chats and phone calls with our Israeli family and pals. They were grieving for their country’s loss.

Only later in the day did Israel receive another gut punch with sickening news about mother Shiri. Hamas had NOT returned her remains of mother Shiri, and the body delivered was thought to be that of a Palestinian woman. For a people whose suffering almost defines them, and for a people who have collectively borne the weight of the October 7th kidnapped, murdered, raped and tortured, the brutality of Hamas’s actions were devastating.

For over five hundred days, we held onto hope for a miracle praying for their survival in the dark tunnels of their barbaric Hamas captors. It was not to be.

It feels painfully personal.

Since October 7^th, our connection within the tight little Jewish world brought us to intersect with the suffering from the conflict and the horror of living next to 2 million barbaric Gazans. We have lost a cousin, a 22-year-old Staff Sgt. Yuval Shoham, of the 401st Armored Brigade’s 9th Battalion. We visited Kibbutz Nir Oz in December 2023 and with the sounds of artillery and machine gun fire in the background, walked through the remnants of the home of Oded Lifshitz, whose body was released at the same time as Kfir and Ariel.

We have spent time with Eitan Halley, a Ben-Gurion University graduate who miraculously survived the Nova Music Festival pogrom. We traveled down to the Nova Music Festival site and walked where the carnage took place. Eitan was in the same bomb shelter as murdered Hersh Goldberg-Polin and recently released hostage Or Levy. We had lunch with two engineering students who returned to their classes with shrapnel still in their bodies. We stood with the saddened crowd on Har Herzl at the burial of Ilan Cohen, a lone soldier from Argentina.

Our Rabbi has tried to explain the Jewish tradition of never leaving anyone behind. And we have listened to countless lectures and podcasts and read in hundreds of articles about the events of October 7^th. The failures of the Israeli military leadership are apparent, and all can speculate about whether an ambivalent Biden Administration was viewed by Hamas as a window of opportunity to undertake the savage invasion.

In America and in other Western capitals, the outrageous common cause pro-Hamas street riots and the university demonstrations added to our sense of unreality. Posters of the Bibas family members were torn from walls as acts of vile defiance. All of this left us with a mix of anger and a resolute commitment to fight back.

Our family and friends in Israel have shared their fears and how their lives are disrupted. Volunteerism helps pick crops and bolsters needy families, and reservists serve hundreds of days. Their children were frequently torn from their beds to hide in bomb shelters as rockets from Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen and even Iran approached. Last May, when we traveled to Jerusalem, our young nephew, holding his little red car, would imitate the sounds of the air raid sirens.

Have Jewish Americans risen in support of their fellow Israelis? Many have, and for some, the multi-front war waged against Israel and the rise of antisemitism still has not affected them enough to take action. Jews did vote for the pro-Israel President Trump in slightly higher numbers, but the majority chose Vice-President Kamala Harris. The likes of four more years of Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan didn’t scare them away. Let’s pray that President Trump and the very pro-Israel team he has assembled will protect Israel and help her defeat her sworn enemies.

What does it take to raise the Jewish American population from its passive torpor? History has repeatedly shown that, left unchecked, this malevolence comes for all Jews and decent people.