This week marks three years since the dark day of October 7, 2023. The hatred and barbarism unleashed that day ignited attacks against Jews in the U.S. and in European countries beyond anything we’ve seen in recent decades. And yet, in the shadow of the worst day in modern Jewish history, the Jewish people did not break; we rose.
Let us never forget that at 6:29 am, on the Shabbat morning of Simchat Torah, Hamas terrorists began the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 men, women, and children were slaughtered in cold blood — among them 46 Americans — and 251 innocents were dragged as hostages to hell on earth, into the terror tunnels beneath Gaza.
Even before the blood had dried, we watched vile mobs exult in the monstrous atrocity. We watched pro-terror encampments metastasize across universities, abetted by morally bankrupt politicians and college administrators who excused the hatred and averted their eyes. More recently, we saw the smoke billowing from Temple Israel in Michigan, where a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist drove a car filled with explosives into a synagogue while Jewish schoolchildren played inside.
We mourned Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, gunned down in our nation’s capital as they left a Jewish community event. We grieved the peaceful marchers set upon in Colorado, the worshippers struck down in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the families gathered to light Hanukkah candles on Bondi Beach who did not make it home.
Last week showed that this poison pursues us even at 35,000 feet. On September 30th, Flydubai flight #1073 was en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 passengers aboard. The Omani co-pilot stabbed the captain in a bid to seize the aircraft and crash it into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. What happened next captured the indomitable spirit and valor of the Jewish people.
After the badly wounded, heroic Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, fought his way to unlock the cockpit door from inside, an Israeli passenger and plumber by trade, Yaniv Hayun, stormed in and overpowered the attacker; other courageous Israeli passengers restrained him. An Israeli dentist worked to staunch the captain’s bleeding. Mere hours after the harrowing attack, every passenger landed in Israel to cheers.
That is who we are: Jews who fight. Jews who won’t let evil triumph. Jews who will never, ever give up.
We see it in those who were carried into the darkness and walked back into the light. Edan Alexander of Tenafly, New Jersey, endured 584 days in the tunnels beneath Gaza; on the day of his liberation, he declared that his story “does not end with survival; it continues with service,” and then he put the uniform of the Jewish state back on.
Keith Siegel of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a grandfather held for 484 days, who was starved and tortured, refused to let his captors extinguish the light within him. Even in the depths, he asked those imprisoned beside him to name one thing each day they remained grateful for. He came home to the embrace of his wife, his children, and his grandchildren.
We see it in the lions of the Israel Defense Forces — the young men and women who stand as a wall between a free Jewish people and those who would annihilate us. We see it in the legions of Israeli reservists who left their homes and their families, giving hundreds of days in uniform since October 7, prepared to lay down their very lives. And we see it in the Americans who crossed an ocean to answer that same call to defend Israel.
Captain Omer Neutra of Plainview, New York, a high school basketball captain and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, made aliyah in 2019 to join the IDF and fell commanding his tank at the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, at just twenty-one years old. For more than two years, Hamas held his body in the tunnels below Gaza, until at last Omer was returned to rest in Israel’s sacred soil. We will never forget his sacrifice.
We see that courage here at home in the United States. On campus after campus, Jewish students wear their Stars of David and their kippot with defiant pride. Many testified before Congress, filed historic civil rights lawsuits, and demanded a reckoning from the college presidents and administrators who failed to protect them. Jewish Americans proudly lit Shabbat candles at the White House. Jewish families and our many friends, who stand beside us with moral courage, continue to rise against the hatred, rallying peacefully in city squares and on the National Mall in the heart of Washington.
Hamas terrorists believed October 7th would break us. Instead, it reawakened an entire generation to be louder and prouder in our Judaism and the shared values that built and sustain the West.
For thousands of years, the Jewish people were defenseless, marched to the slaughter as the victims of history’s horrors. Not anymore. Today, the Jewish people have a nation in our ancestral home, and a generation of lions with boundless courage to defend our homeland and our people everywhere.
On this anniversary of October 7th, let us continue to be Jews who fight and win against the darkness. Am Yisrael Chai.
Matt Brooks is the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), the national grassroots organization of Jewish Republicans, which represents tens of thousands of Jewish Republicans across the country.
