Israel

I am writing this column while sitting in a shelter as an air raid siren is blaring outside my father’s home in Jerusalem. It is just over a week since the Simchas Torah Massacre. I need not describe what happened. You have no doubt read about it elsewhere. What we need to understand clearly is that what Hamas did on Simchas Torah is what they would do to you and your family given the opportunity. The fight is your fight.

When David Kirschbaum, 23, was four months old, his mother took the newborn sabra back to Queens, where she raised him with the help of his grandparents. But his birthplace never left him. “He watched the Second Lebanon War on television with his grandmother at age six,” she said. He initially attended the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, and at home he kept kosher in a “Conservadox” approach to Jewish life.

An Olah's Perspective on the War in Israel

For better or for worse, the valley behind our new block in Ramat Shiloh has become an echo chamber, carrying the reverberations of the airstrikes on Gaza right to our back doors. We hear the booms all day, signifying the calculated destruction of our evil enemies. But we also hear the sirens ring, bringing us racing to our safe room.

In the hours after the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival in Kibbutz Re’im, West Hempstead resident Moshe Nisenboym learned that his niece Zhenya Nisenboym, 32, and nephew Ilan Moshe Akov, 29, had disappeared after thousands of Hamas terrorists blew in a gap in the border fence separating the Gaza Strip from southern Israel. As concertgoers ran for their lives, hundreds of them were gunned down or kidnapped.

Those who claim to be the arbiters of peace, civility, and intellectualism are also the ones who have no discernible moral compass. International organizations like the United Nations and the International Red Cross will bend over backwards to ensure that they take sides against Israel when they are attacked, so they end up doing the bidding of Hamas. This moral cowardice cannot be forgotten or forgiven, nor should pressure from these organizations determine what course of action Israel should take going forward.

The Simchas Torah massacre in Israel has changed our world irrevocably. The tragedy has the power to categorize all events going forward as either pre-October 7 or post-October 7.