The world won’t go back to the way it was on October 6th, 2023. At least not for us or the people of Israel. The emotional hours before the party in which we sent messages about the Nova Festival, the place people just wanted to go to enjoy music, people, alcohol, and a good time. From moments of joy to shock, from shock to fright. From fright to retreat. From retreat, between loss and hope. We realize that a lot of people in the world, including many Jews living in the Diaspora, don’t know what really happened here.
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, the terror organization, Hamas, executed a surprise attack on Israel. In the beginning, they started and continued with heavy rocket fire on Israeli soil, with an emphasis on the Southern and Metropolitan areas. The attack was larger than average, and before someone could even understand what was happening, let alone respond, terrorists breached the border fence like a wall of Legos in a toddler playground. Through the whole they made in the fence, more than 3,000 terrorists invaded Israel, attacked, raided IDF military bases, infiltrated civilian towns, occupied them, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered many.
In the attack, more then 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, were murdered, and thousands more were injured, including hundreds in critical condition. In the attack on the 7th of October, the Nova Festival massacre occurred, as well near Kibbutz Reim. The same party that we were at and survived to tell this story.
In the massacre, Israelis, foreigners, and soldiers alike were murdered, including babies, children, women, elderly, and of course, men of all ages. Hundreds were taken hostage into the Gaza Strip, including babies, children, women, and elderly. The terrorists tortured, abused, amputated limbs, raped, burned people alive, murdered pets, looted and desecrated corpses, and spread a lot of destruction. We’re talking about the worst catastrophe the Jewish people have seen since the Holocaust and the largest terror attack in the history of the state of Israel.
In the time the state looked for the correct move between left and right – Hamas knew exactly where they were going – and pushed straight forward, with bloodshot eyes, noise in their soul, and fingers waiting to pull the trigger on a plan that seemed many years in the making.
If a bomb went off in the middle of an island in the middle of nowhere – did it really go off? A philosophical question that leads to our responsibility to share our story to people that don’t know or don’t understand what exactly happened on October 7th, 2023. This is our responsibility, to remember and memorialize the victims, the wounded, the survivors, the families that were destroyed and forever changed, the millions of Jews burned and scarred, and those whose lives will never go back to the way they were. It’s not just our responsibility as an organization, but our responsibility as a state, as a nation.
