Two contrasting Simcha Torah memories

By Heidi Gantwerk in San Diego

This weekend, at a chaotic, joy-filled Simchat Torah service, I had the chance to take one of our Torah scrolls and dance, surrounded by family, friends, and congregants I may not know but who were singing and dancing right alongside me. Even more special, I was holding a Torah that my family had helped write, an experience I will never forget.

This was, without question, z’man simchateinu, the time of our rejoicing. As we unrolled the Torah and hundreds of people put on purple gloves to hold it, I was struck by something simple and beautiful: you can only unroll a Torah when you have a community there to hold it. In that moment, I felt incredibly lucky to be part of such a vibrant and proud Jewish community.

As has been true for me on Simchat Torah these last few years, after we rerolled the Torah, the adorable first graders finished celebrating their consecration with their little scrolls, and the chairs had been cleared away, my mind went back to Simchat Torah morning in 2023.

My husband and I were on vacation in San Sebastian, Spain. After a night of sampling pintxos and red wine and wandering the magnificent city, we were asleep when my phone started buzzing. I grabbed it and heard the voice of my dear friend Lior Niski, then CEO of Sha’ar HaNegev. He was in tears and breathless.

“There are hundreds of terrorists in the kibbutzim. Ofir is murdered. The army isn’t here. I didn’t want you to hear it from the news or social media. I have to go.”

That phone call became a dividing line between everything that came before and my experience of the last three years. The rest of the day was a blur. We shortened our trip, booking flights home the next morning.

My WhatsApp from that day is still hard to read. Messages to friends in Israel, trying to find out if they were safe. Some were, some weren’t. Calls with our amazing staff, who immediately began working around the clock to get information to our community and find ways for us to support one another. Calls with our board to authorize financial support that very day, knowing it would be needed. News interviews conducted over Zoom on my iPhone.

And grief and fear as we learned of more people who had been murdered and heard reports of hostages being taken, including babies and elderly people. As we learned what had happened at Nova. As the scale of what would become the deadliest day in Israel’s history began to emerge.

A week later, Lior sent me his Shabbat message to the Sha’ar HaNegev community, which by then was scattered across the country:

“In a few hours the Sabbath will enter. A difficult and sad Shabbat in which we will be together – every family and community. We will hug, we will cry, we will remember our loved ones, we will be proud of our heroes and happy about life. These are difficult days, but we will get through it together. Because there is no other option.”

I have thought about that message many times since he shared it with me. Ever since then, like Lior wrote, we have gotten through it together. We have focused on recovery, rebuilding, on hope.

Three years on, people across our community are carrying this anniversary in different ways. Some feel a pull to gather, to learn, to tell the stories of those who we lost, or to reaffirm their connection to Israel and to our brothers and sisters in Sha’ar HaNegev. Others may need quiet, and many of us are holding several of these feelings at once.

There isn’t a single right way to mark October 7, and we don’t think there should be one.

With that in mind, we’ve created an October 7 resource hub, curated by our wonderful Community Shlicha, Amit Levi. It’s designed as a toolkit you can draw from for whatever you’re interested in, whether that’s a personal moment of reflection, or a conversation at a dinner table or in a classroom. You’ll find testimonies, songs, texts, stories, and other materials you can choose from.

I hope you find something in this toolkit that speaks to you. I will end by quoting our friend and partner in Sha’ar HaNegev, Rotem Asaf, who this morning wrote:

“The truth is, we carry this memory with us every day of the year. We do not look away from the tragedy or the pain. But alongside it, we continue to hold onto hope, to rebuild and to choose life… Our community is our resilience. It is what carries us through the hardest moments and reminds us, again and again, that we are here to stay.”

She concludes her beautiful message with “Together we remember. Together we choose hope.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

*

Heidi Gantwerk is the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of San Diego.