Dearest friends,
We, the Jewish people, are experiencing a time of collective mourning for the 900+ lives that have already been lost in the war that began at 4:30 AM on Simchas Torah, one of the most joyous days on the Jewish calendar. I have personally been in a state of shock and sorrow, and numb from the sheer devastation that comes out of the internet, every few minutes, without fail. Our pain is a vehicle for content creation. Our men, women and children are being kidnapped, raped, murdered. Their bodies, like pieces of city litter, thrown into the back of trucks and trampled on, danced around. There is no way to express the grief that we experience today and that we will continue to experience as this war rages on. The faces of our dead brothers and sisters are buried into my brain for the rest of my life. The family of five that was wiped off the face of the earth, their light shining, even in a tiny Instagram photo. The redheaded twins that were kidnapped. The teenager pulled by her hair, blood matted around her scalp. The kippah-clad commander. The babies in cages. The twin babies left alone for 13 hours because their parents were murdered fighting off Hamas terrorists. Where does the sorrow begin? Where does the pain end? Where does the world come in? Will anyone speak out for us? We are screaming and I do not hear but a whisper from the world at large.
I have a very small audience, but an audience of people who I know, love and trust. And so, I am asking all of you to not be numb. Yes, we must take breaks from the news and protect our mental health but we must also act. Write down your thoughts, get angry, and do something. Something means many different things: go to a vigil/rally, say a prayer, do a good deed, reach out to your loved ones, the list goes on and on. Do not be complicit. Do not be quiet. Donate money. My god, there are so many individuals and organizations who need money right now.
For the sake of ease, and after what happened during the war in Ukraine last year, I found that many individuals were paralyzed about where to donate and that led to a complete freeze. Don’t freeze. If you are one of those people, you can send money to me via Venmo (@janearielkatz) and I will be donating it and posting receipts on social media. I am in contact with individuals in Israel and am trying to distribute funds between large and small orgs. Yesterday I donated to 3 large orgs (listed below) and today I will donate to 4 southern kibbutzim that were devastated, as well as two units in the IDF that need equipment purchased. It makes absolutely no difference to me if you donate through me or yourself, just donate. I implore you. Give, and give generously. Give like it is your own son or daughter fighting to secure our ancestral homeland.
If you would like to donate yourself, the organizations I have heard are desperately in need.
Below are the words I wrote and shared on social media about the situation unfolding and how it feels as a Jew in the Diaspora.
I keep telling myself I will stop posting. It’s enough. The world has enough news sources- I don’t need to be another one. And yet, what else is there to say or do as we witness our brothers and sisters being thrown into caravans and cut into bits and pieces for parts? What else are we to do as we watch viral videos of entire families being killed, men, women, and children. What else are we to do as we see a holocaust survivor wheeled around Gaza while the animals around her sing and dance? For this, she survived? For this, we live?
When I arrived in Tel Aviv for the first time at 19 years old, I cried. Despite coming from generations of soviet Jews and myself being born and raised in America, I, like millions of Jewish people, felt home. My bones snapped into place. My spine straightened. My knees buckled. My heart softened. I knew that for reasons I could never eloquently express, I was home.
I feel myself getting so worked up over the war happening right now and I know that I can never understand the generations of dead ancestors inside of me causing this type of fight or flight. Not one generation of Jewish people has known what it is like to not be kicked out of our homes. Not one generation has found ourselves at home in Spain or France or America or anywhere in the world without a consistent drum beat of antisemitism surrounding us. Not one generation has not heard stories of how we packed up our bags and ran for our lives. Not one.
And now we have Israel, and even that is too much for the world to bear. Even that tiny plot of land, in a sea of nations who do not recognize her sovereignty nor do they recognize the sanctity of human life, even that is too much. The world is perfectly okay to take everything from us, over and over and over again. To strip us of the one place we’ve been allowed to call home since 6 million of our mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, grandmothers, marched off into the gas chambers while the world turned their neck.
I can’t help but shake this feeling, this deep well of sadness inside my gut. The despair that more Jews have been slaughtered this Simchat Torah than any single day since the Holocaust, that history is repeating herself again, and that more Jews will continue to die in defense, while the world not only watches, but they applaud. They head to Times Square and wave their flags and sing their songs. From the river to sea, Palestine will be free. Kill the Jews. We don’t care, they deserve it. They did this to themselves. Under the guise of social justice, they applaud the militants and find excuses for their atrocious behavior. They blame us for our very existence, despite how much we give and give and we give. There is no justice and there is no peace for us, unless we pry it away from their bloody hands ourselves.
And amidst the despair, there is a tiny ray of light that bursts out. That ray is Israel. How blessed are we that we do in fact have a homeland to fight for? Something that thousands of years of Jewish people could never say. We do have a beautiful, vibrant Israel that embraces us with her pomegranate stands and her date trees, with her blazing sun and with her blue sea from the moment we are born until the moment we die. And yet, how horrific it is that we have to fight for our right to exist. What choice do we have? We must fight for our right to live and to be and we must be brave the way that hundreds of generations of Jews before us have been. We must not give in to our tears. We must fight and we must give money and we must pray and we MUST WIN.
May Hashem bless all of our soldiers. May He protect the homeland of our great great grandparents and the homeland of our children. May He crush the evil that fights us and bring us a complete victory and a period of infinite peace that awaits us after the darkest days that we are witnessing. May he bring comfort to those who are mourning the loss of their loved ones. May their memories be a blessing to our nation and may they, and all of the angels who gave their life for our Jewish people, watch over us.
We are one nation, one people, one soul and one body. Am Israel Chai.