One Year Later: How October 7 Changed Me

Live More Jewishly

By Ariella Silberman, as told to Barbara Bensoussan

In the aftermath of October 7, I am living my Judaism in a much more open way, wearing a Magen David necklace, studying Jewish history and feeling more connected to Israel as our indigenous homeland. I think about aliyah.

I did not grow up Orthodox and my ex-husband isn’t Jewish. But since October 7, I’ve tried to have a daily infusion of Judaism in my life and in my children’s lives.

A few days after the massacre, I saw a post for a program called “Just One Thing,” in which you try to do one Jewish thing in the merit of a specific soldier. I began saying Shema every night along with a Mi Sheberach for “my” soldier, and I started bringing in Shabbat fifteen minutes early.

I signed up with Partners in Torah as a merit as well. I was paired with Raquel from New York and felt that I’d found my sister. We study the teachings of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the parashah.

October 7 changed my relationship to Judaism, to the non-Jewish world, to Israel, to parenting, to everything.

To me, the response to October 7 is to live more Jewishly.

Ariella Silberman lives in Dallas with her family.

Barbara Bensoussan is a writer in Brooklyn and a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.

Countering the Hate

By Abraham Bree, as told to Barbara Bensoussan

I’m a marketing professional, so social media is my bread and butter. After October 7, as I scrolled through X, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “You Jews deserve it,” some people wrote. “Stop occupying Palestine!” said others.

The haters clearly had no grasp of the facts. How do you counteract a flood of anti-Israel narratives that have more likes on social media than a cat meme?

I sat down and began replying to these posts. But I’m no Ben Shapiro—I don’t have all the facts on the tip of my tongue. After an hour, I realized I’d only managed to reply to about four posts. There were hundreds of posts I wanted to respond to!

Then it occurred to me that I could enlist virtual help. I’m a typical Flatbush guy who runs a no-frills ad agency out of a Brooklyn storefront. Recently, I’d begun using AI tools for marketing campaigns in my business. Why not create an AI engine to give factual, cohesive responses to social media? I thought. Why not harness the power of AI to negate the hate?

I posted my idea on LinkedIn and on a few WhatsApp groups. Almost a dozen people from different points on the Jewish spectrum volunteered to help: a Chassidic developer in Toronto; a non-religious Sephardic full-stack coding engineer in Tel Aviv; a Modern Orthodox copywriter in Teaneck.

Our group held sessions on Zoom to create the app. The goal was to train a data set to give forceful, fact-based, pro-Israel responses to hate posts, circumventing systemic blocks to pro-Israel content. After four sleepless, caffeine-powered days, we had an app called ProjectTruthIsrael.com up and running.

I said to our group, “Under other circumstances, our paths would probably never have crossed. Yet here we are, all of us fellow Jews, giving our time and resources to help the Jewish nation.”

I sent out our app experimentally to a bunch of Jewish WhatsApp groups, expecting to garner a few hundred responses. Within one night, I had 3,000 users. After one month, 41,000 people were using the app, generating over 80,000 response points.

The app was really working well, churning out compelling factual messages to counteract misinformation and antisemitism. Then, a few weeks ago, I opened my computer on Motzaei Shabbos to find a message: “Your AI token threshold is over the limit.” “Hacktivists” from the Middle East had bombarded our site to the point where they shut it down. I have been working ever since to find a way to get my site up again and circumvent further attacks.

Despite this (hopefully temporary) setback, I am very proud of what we accomplished. While we made a small dent in the social media world, I think we made a much bigger dent in the heavens: a diverse group of Jews came together to help our brothers and sisters in Israel.

Abraham Bree runs a marketing agency in Brooklyn, New York.

No Longer Silent

By Maxine Clamage, as told to Steve Lipman

I was born in Chicago eighty-seven years ago.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, as the Holocaust was unfolding, I would listen to my American-born parents speaking about the German atrocities and about the Jews suffering in Europe.

But back then children were supposed to be quiet.

Dad was drafted into the US Army when I was six years old. He was captured by the Nazis and sent to a slave labor camp for Jews only. He was liberated and, thank G-d, came home.

We were not religious, and did not observe any holidays except for Passover. We never belonged to a synagogue.

October 7 made me feel more Jewish. I felt I had to do something for the Jewish people. I realized I had to speak up.

Now I spend my time on Facebook and Instagram, sharing pro-Israel videos on a daily basis.

I bought a siddur with English translation; I don’t read Hebrew. I bought more Jewish books. I’m paying more attention. I must. I couldn’t speak up in the 1930s as the Holocaust approached, so I’m speaking up now on behalf of Israel and my fellow Jews.

Maxine Clamage is an eighty-seven-year-old retired paralegal living in Mill Valley, California.

Steve Lipman is a frequent contributor to the magazine.

“Pointing” the Way to Simchah

By Dr. Arnold Berlin, MD, as told to Barbara Bensoussan

As I sat on a plane to Israel last winter, October 7 was fresh in everyone’s minds. I knew there were thousands of suffering families—victims of terror, victims of tragedies, and families who had been forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods. I wanted to do something.

I work as a physician in Williamsburg, with a largely Chassidic and Hispanic clientele. My work has led me to become involved with Miles for Life, an organization that funds medical travel for foreign patients who need to come to the US for medical care. I am often asked to write statements attesting to the necessity of medical travel so that patients and their accompanying caregivers can apply for visas. Miles for Life collects unused travel and credit card points from donors to pay for the patients’ travel.

While on the plane, I thought, “If we can use points to benefit patients from South America and other countries, why not use them to help Jews ravaged by the war in Israel?” It seemed like an easy, cost-free way to give tzedakah and lend support to our brethren in Israel who desperately need it.

The flight passed quickly as I sketched out a plan. I didn’t want to fund trauma relief only. Life goes on after trauma, and challenged families still need to make simchas and celebrate holidays even when the usual funds have dried up. I wanted to channel unused miles and points to fund bringing joy into difficult lives. I was sitting next to an accountant who became so interested in my idea that he stayed in touch to check on my progress after I got home!

Simchapoints.org, now under the Chibuk Foundation, is open for business, with the aim of helping challenged Israeli families afford the bright spots in their lives: bar mitzvahs, weddings, yamim tovim, even camps for their children. Donors can earmark funds for a specific event—for example, a family making a bar mitzvah can donate money for an Israeli family’s bar mitzvah expenses.

Before we Jews were the Startup Nation, we were the “Chesed Nation.” October 7 opened our eyes to the need to empathize with our fellow Jews in Israel and extend a helping hand as best we can.

Dr. Arnold Berlin is a clinical assistant professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College.

Working for the Jewish Community

By Asher Butler

When October 7 happened, I was a high school teacher in a non-Jewish charter school in Brooklyn. In the days that followed, we were given a mandatory curriculum for our advisory students that sought to “contextualize the conflict” and denied any historical ties between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland prior to the nineteenth century. As a direct result, I started looking for new, meaningful work, ways I could invest my time and energy into the Jewish world. I was lucky enough to be hired to write security grants by Project Protect, a division of the OU’s Teach Coalition, which secures and implements government funding to protect our Jewish institutions. Through this job I’ve had the privilege to talk to stakeholders across the entire spectrum of Jewish communal life, find out their histories and the risks they face in their neighborhoods, and help them address their urgent need for safety. This work has been a profound source of personal pride for me and has made me feel more connected to the Jewish nation than I ever felt before.

As I write, a week from today I will have my interview with the Jewish Agency, and, G-d-willing, I will be making aliyah shortly. My greatest hope is to continue doing this security work for the Jewish community here in the United States while finding new ways to connect and give of myself in whatever way I can in Eretz Yisrael. Before October 7 and its aftermath, I did not understand the overwhelming imperative of achdut and ahavat Yisrael. While I’m ashamed it took something so evil to teach me, I will never forget the lesson.

Currently living in Queens, New York, Asher Butler hopes to be making aliyah in the fall.

Baked with Love

By Carol Green Ungar

When we learned that October 7 survivors, most from secular and anti-religious kibbutzim, were staying in a hotel near our Chareidi town, a group of us drove out to see them. At the hotel door, a social worker barred our entry: “They don’t need anything. Go.”

We went home crestfallen and puzzled.

Was there really nothing to do?

Then one of us had an idea: “Let’s send them challah rolls, candles and notes of support.”

A WhatsApp message went out, and dozens of volunteers responded. By erev Shabbat we had received so many packages that we needed additional volunteers to deliver them to the hotel.

We left them with the hotel staff. But we weren’t sure. Would our lovingly assembled packages end up in the trash? Had we mobilized the entire community for nothing?

When we returned days later, we found out that our packages had indeed been delivered.

“We ate them,” said an elderly male evacuee, “but don’t send them again.” Our gesture had fallen on its face. Was there something else we could do? “Yes,” a heavily tattooed kibbutz woman piped up. “We can use four cakes every day for our coffee room.” That was clear enough. Since then, we have been baking and sending our cakes to evacuees—yeast cakes, kokosh cakes, batches of cookie bars, et cetera. The cakes are delivered to a central collection point, where volunteers pick them up and deliver them.

It seems trivial, but it’s not. The evacuees value our initiative. “You are angels. We feel your love in your baking,” they tell us. They smile, and sometimes they hug us. The evacuees have consistently refused our Shabbat and holiday invites. Often the evacuees aren’t around, and the volunteers hang the bag of cakes on the door of the social hall. When we do see them, it’s clear they love our cakes, and because of that they love us.

As I write this, eight months into the war, most of the survivors have returned home to Kiryat Ye’arim, but forty Gaza Envelope families remain at a hotel in our area. And we continue to send them our homemade cakes. They still smile. They still hug us. They still call us angels. But we haven’t (yet) become friends. Though we stand on opposite sides of a deeply religious and sociopolitical rift, we’re no longer anonymous “despicable dossim.” Our cakes have built a bridge of love between us. Maybe this is the way our country will heal.

Carol Green Ungar is an award-winning writer living in the Judean Hills.

The Depths of Prayer

By Adina Hershberg

I have always been a light sleeper. I usually wake up a few times during the night—which is not uncommon in the over-sixty crowd. In the past, I would turn over and try to get back to sleep. The consequences of the war—murdered and injured civilians, soldiers killed or wounded in the fighting, hostages languishing in captivity, bereaved families, displaced Israelis, many people without a livelihood, et cetera—have turned these nocturnal awakenings into times of tefillah.

On our yishuv, in the middle of the night, I don’t hear washing machines spinning, telephones ringing, or traffic whizzing by—even the street cats have gone to sleep. It’s an opportunity to daven without interruption. There is nothing like war to serve as a catalyst for increased and more heartfelt tefillah.

Adina Hershberg is a writer living in Rosh Tzurim, Israel.

Choosing Life

By anonymous, as told to Carol Green Ungar

I was supposed to be at the Nova Festival; I had badly wanted to go. A month before, I was at another Nova party and had a great time. The DJ at that party—who was also the DJ at the October 7 Nova—offered me a deal: if I sold fifteen tickets, I could go to the next Nova for free.

I’m an Aries, which means I’m stubborn. I contacted friends all over the country and plugged the party on my Instagram stories—but I couldn’t get anyone to buy a ticket. So I didn’t end up going.

When I first heard what happened, I couldn’t thank Hashem enough. But it was also very hard. My world turned over. I had lost a lot of my friends. I went from funeral to funeral. For a long time I wanted to die, too. I prayed to Hashem to take me and bring them back.

When I found out that Elia had died [Elia Toledano had disappeared and was thought to have been kidnapped; the IDF discovered his body in December], my eyes opened up. Elia was a tzaddik. He was full of love and light. He hadn’t been my friend for long, but he entered my soul. Knowing him made me want to be a good person in the way that he was. I threw away my immodest clothing. Now I am trying to keep Shabbat and be a good person.

Before October 7, I was self-destructive. I was bulimic. I used drugs. I even attempted suicide. Now I ask myself how I dared to undervalue my life. I want to sanctify my life in his memory and in memory of the other friends I lost.

I realized that I need help. I will be entering a rehab tomorrow. I’ll be done with the program on Simchat Torah—what are the chances of that?

Hashem kept me alive. I still have a tikkun. The ones who died finished their tikkun, their life mission. I try to dedicate myself to their memory. I feel Elia’s spirit accompanying me. Now I am choosing life.

Dedicated to the memory of Elia Toledano

Supporting Our Soldiers—One Duffel at a Time

By Jeff Eisenberg, as told to Nechama Carmel

Since graduating college, I’ve been looking for my “1942 moment.” My mantra has always been: I want to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye when they ask me what I was doing “during 1942.” So quite frankly, when Hamas attacked on Simchat Torah, I said, “This is it. This is my 1942 moment.”

I was blessed to have built a successful business, which I sold some years back, and at the age of fifty I went into klal work full time. That’s always been my passion. In the aftermath of October 7, I created a WhatsApp chat around helping Israel. Within a few weeks, it maxed out, with over 1,024 participants. We started collecting items for soldiers, displaced families, and everyone and anyone in need in Israel; I arranged drop-off centers in different locations. We collected deodorant, soap, baby formula and clothing, as well as army supplies such as tourniquets, winter gear, gloves, tents and sleeping bags. We had people on the ground in Israel keeping us informed as to what was needed. At the outset, we filled 400 to 500 duffel bags, about eighty pallets. Except for the army supplies, everything else was donated. Soon, shuls started arranging missions, and members started buying supplies on Amazon for soldiers to bring along on the missions. It made no sense.

We started negotiating with military suppliers so we could buy the supplies wholesale; we bought what would have cost $650,000 on Amazon for about $225,000.

Ultimately, we moved into a warehouse, which today serves as the biggest IDF gear store in the world and is now known as the Israel / IDF Chesed Center in the Five Towns. People come in, take a duffel bag and an order form, and “shop” for supplies. They pay for it and pack it, and we send it.

In addition, the Israel Chesed Center serves as a community center of sorts, with ongoing events to support Israel, including presentations by rabbis and soldiers, and musical events; we even host bar and bat mitzvah or other parties where participants can help pack duffel bags, make tzitzit for soldiers, or get involved in other ways. Schools and kiruv organizations from around the world have come here. As of this writing in June, we’ve sent over 8,000 duffel bags in six forty-foot containers to Israel.

When rabbis come to visit this center, they call it a “mikdash me’at,” a holy place.

Jeff Eisenberg is a community activist who lives in the Five Towns in New York.

Nechama Carmel is editor-in-chief of Jewish Action.

Re“Jew”venated

By Xander Posner

Since October 7, I started my journey of Torah observance and joined an Orthodox community. My life has changed in every way, all for the better. I was honored to receive a set of beautiful tefillin from the Tefillin Project, which I put on each morning. I wear tzitzit and a yarmulke and daven with a minyan every Shabbat.

The rapid steps I’ve taken toward Torah observance have been made possible by the exceedingly welcoming Milwaukee community, Kehillah of Congregation Beth Jehudah under Rabbi Michel Twerski.

Connecting to my Judaism has felt like the most important and meaningful undertaking of my life so far. I knew I had to present as unmistakably Jewish to make it clear to the world that October 7 didn’t make me scared to be a Jew. To the contrary, it has made me prouder to be a Jew than ever before.

Xander Posner recently moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to Milwaukee.

Echoes of the Holocaust

By Rabbi Dr. Hillel Goldberg

The events of October 7 and the ensuing war have deeply affected my approach to prayer. The recitation of Avinu Malkeinu in particular has deepened my awareness of our utter dependence on the Almighty. Phrase after phrase in Avinu Malkeinu captures the horror and dread that the sheer hatred and inhumanity of the Hamas terrorists have powerfully brought home. To illustrate briefly:

• Nullify all harsh decrees—the physical threat.

• Shut the mouths of our accusers—the defamation of the good name of the Jewish people, a separate evil from the physical suffering.

• Have mercy on us, on our children, on our infants—yes, the enemy comes for all of us, regardless of age, as the hostage horror only too blatantly shows.

• Act for the sake of those murdered for Your Holy Name—What? Wasn’t that consigned to the past? Weren’t those days long behind the Jewish people?

With this last phrase in Avinu Malkeinu I reach the second deep effect of October 7 on my faith: my relationship to Jewish history. I am a student of the Holocaust. I own hundreds of books on the Holocaust, and at virtually any given point I am reading one of them. A terrible, incomprehensible history, to be sure—but a history. No more. Now, so much of what I have learned about the Holocaust flows into my consciousness as the news unfolds. Is the non-evidence-based Jew hatred on many college campuses like the corruption of the universities during the 1930s in Germany? Are the groundless accusations from the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice representative of a vast indifference to Jewish fate, akin to the years between 1939 and 1945? I don’t know, but the slicing pain of the questions takes me back to a period in which the practice of Judaism could not assume the confidence and optimism that my own practice has always enjoyed.

All this has deepened my faith by connecting me to what unfortunately has been the dominant thread throughout most of Jewish history: “In the midst of My people I dwell.”

But then, in counterpoint, my profound alienation has also sharpened my appreciation for the unexpected, beautiful islands of solidarity expressed by non-Jews reaching out to me. For that, and for so much else, we must refocus and reenergize our prayers.

A contributing editor of Jewish Action, Rabbi Goldberg is editor and publisher of Intermountain Jewish News.

My Answer to October 7

By Viva Hammer

After Hamas attacked Israel, I wanted to do something. Something more than obsessively reading my phone, going to rallies and donating money. And there, among the mass of phone messages, was one from a school in a remote part of Sydney. They needed a Torah teacher.

I answered the message. I gave a model lesson in the heat of December (which is summer in Australia). I spent January in libraries in Jerusalem preparing to teach Torah. The school gave me no information, no curriculum. A blank slate. While Israel was at war, I was going to teach Torah at the end of the Diaspora.

I closed my books in Jerusalem and the next day I walked down the ramp at Ben Gurion Airport, the faces of the hostages at my left and at my right. I wrote a note to the littlest hostage Kfir, fastened it to his picture, and flew south into the summer of Sydney. Upon landing, I walked into a fifth-grade classroom. On the board I wrote the aleph bet, and the children copied. I taught them about the holiday that was coming up, the holiday of Purim, in which a megalomaniacal Haman convinces a king to issue a decree of genocide against the Jews of Persia, which the wise Jewish Queen Esther thwarts.

I taught them about the next holiday, Pesach, in which a megalomaniacal Pharaoh of Egypt tries to eliminate the Children of Israel by enslaving them and throwing their boys into the river. Which G-d thwarts, delivering them to freedom with an outstretched arm.

Sydney has been doused by antisemitism since October 7, as have many cities of the Diaspora. It’s disorienting and frightening, but I can’t do anything about it. Thwarting antisemitism is not my task, nor is it the task of the Jews. Our task is to follow Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles (Chap. 29): plant trees, build houses, marry off our children and have grandchildren.

And teach our children about the miracle of Purim and the Exodus from Egypt and the victory of Chanukah against the Greeks, and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the Crusades and the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, and—

The atrocities of Hamas.

Who, except museum curators and Jewish children, speaks about ancient Egyptians? Who, except for the Jews, will remember Hamas?

Teaching children Torah. That is my task and the task of the Jews.

And that is my answer to October 7.

Viva Hammer is a writer living in Sydney, Austraila.