Three years after Oct. 7, 2023, the date still carries a weight that is difficult to put into words. For Houston\u2019s Jewish community, it remains a marker of grief, solidarity and unresolved loss. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Oct. 7, nearly 450 members of Houston\u2019s Jewish community gathered in the Becker Theater at The Emery\/Weiner School to remember the lives lost in the brutal Hamas attack, stand with Israel and hear the story of one young woman whose world \u2013 and whose family\u2019s world \u2013 was forever changed.<\/p>\n
The program, \u201cOctober 7 \u2013 Marking Three Years,\u201d was organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston, the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center and the Consulate General of Israel to the Southwest, with Emery\/Weiner serving as host. EWS Rabbi Laura Sheinkopf, director of Jewish Life and Community Outreach, emceed the event, and Stuart Dow, EWS head of school, moderated the evening\u2019s discussion.<\/p>\n
For Beth Yeshurun Rabbi Emeritus Steven Morgen, the gathering was not simply important to show our support to friends and relatives living in Israel, but to all Jews everywhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cParticularly when so many people are ignoring or erasing the brutality and inhumanity of what happened on Oct. 7, and focusing instead on the destruction in Gaza, it\u2019s important for us to remind the world what happened and why Israel felt the need to respond the way they did,\u201d Rabbi Morgen told the JHV.<\/p>\n
The evening included musical performances by EWS students Ella Navon, Yali Kaplan, Ethan Stulberg, Julia Ziff and Haley Lane; \u201cEl Malei Rachamim\u201d was sung by EWS Rabbi Ari Vernon. The program included remarks from Israeli and Houston Jewish community leaders; a candle-lighting ceremony; poetry readings; and a screening of \u201cFind Me, Okay?\u201d a documentary about Eden Yerushalmi, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7.<\/p>\n
Remembering the people behind the numbers
The program featured the human stories behind the statistics.<\/p>\n
Israeli Consul Elad Shoshan described Oct. 7 as a date that \u201cforever changed Israel and Jewish communities around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
He recalled the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, when sirens began sounding at 6:29 a.m. What initially seemed like another rocket attack soon became an unimaginable tragedy.<\/p>\n
More than 1,200 people were murdered and 251 were taken hostage.<\/p>\n
But, Shoshan said, numbers alone cannot convey the human cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese numbers help us understand the scale of what happened. But they cannot tell us whose seat is empty at the dinner table or who still reaches to the phone to call someone who will never answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also spoke about the ordinary people who responded that day \u2013 parents, neighbors, off-duty soldiers, first-responders and strangers who drove toward the gunfire to help others.<\/p>\n
\u201cOrdinary people do extraordinary things.\u201d
Ren\u00e9e Wizig-Barrios, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston, spoke about the Houston community\u2019s response to Oct. 7 and the Federation\u2019s continuing support for Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur role as the Federation is to bring our community together, stand side by side with Israel and make sure that there are meaningful opportunities for connection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wizig-Barrios noted that the Houston Jewish community raised more than $20 million in the aftermath of Oct. 7. The Federation also continues to support Israel through its Annual Campaign, allocating more than $16 million this year in grants to nonprofits working in areas including agriculture, small-business recovery, soldier rehabilitation and mental health services.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Federation is committed to continuing to bring the community together to stand in solidarity, to provide financial support, to build understanding about the complex country we love,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She also spoke about the rise in antisemitism and the continuing threats facing Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday and always, we are united as one Jewish people. Am Yisrael Chai.\u201d<\/p>\n
One woman, one family, one story
The emotional center of the evening was the screening of \u201cFind Me, Okay?\u201d which tells the story of Eden Yerushalmi and her family.<\/p>\n
What began as a family\u2019s desperate effort to bring Eden home became a journey through hope, uncertainty, advocacy and heartbreaking loss.<\/p>\n
Before the film, Larry Skolnik, CEO of the J, joined Shoshan for a candle-lighting ceremony.<\/p>\n
The film distilled the enormous tragedy of Oct. 7 to the story of one person, making the abstract heartbreak painfully personal.<\/p>\n
Rabbi Morgen said that singularity was part of what made the film so powerful.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you tell [the story] as one person and then multiply it by 1,200, you have a better sense of the horror of what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following the screening, Dow moderated a conversation with producer Jeff Hoffman, director Yula Gidron and Arbel Ashkenazy, a survivor of the Nova festival and one of Eden\u2019s closest friends.<\/p>\n
For Gidron, making the documentary was difficult from the beginning. Originally, she turned down the job. Entering the Yerushalmi family\u2019s home with cameras while they were dealing with the uncertainty surrounding Eden\u2019s condition was difficult, she said, but ultimately, she felt the story needed to be told.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the point of view of the family, it\u2019s intimate and also respectful. I\u2019m proud that they did this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ashkenazy also initially resisted participating in making the film.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t want to do this movie. Really,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it was very unreal to bring cameras in to film people in the difficult time in our life.\u201d<\/p>\n
But after coming to the United States, she said she understood why the film mattered.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, I know that this movie is important because it\u2019s not a movie. It\u2019s part of our life \u2013 and it\u2019s part of my healing journey \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Hoffman, the filmmakers wanted to tell Eden\u2019s story rather than try to tell the story of Oct. 7 through a collection of images and statistics.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of that day, we just knew that this was the story we wanted to tell \u2013 what we heard about Eden, that she was just such an amazing, loving, fun, happy person that everyone fell in love with, that we thought this would just be an incredible story of tragedy, hostage, survivor and a reunion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hoffman said the filmmakers initially expected the story to end with Eden\u2019s return.<\/p>\n
Instead, Eden was one of six hostages executed by Hamas on Aug. 29, 2024. The story became one of tragedy and loss but also of family, friendship and resilience.<\/p>\n
For the filmmakers, it comes down to making sure Eden\u2019s story \u2013 and the stories of thousands of others \u2013 are not forgotten.<\/p>\n
Hoffman put it simply:<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just one story, one person, one family and, like I said earlier, there were thousands of these stories, and they were all as tragic and heartbreaking as this one.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the goal is for people to understand what those caught in the attack experienced.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want the world to understand what these kids went through; what all these Israelis and non-Israelis went through that day. People are forgetting it. They\u2019re denying it. They\u2019re focusing on everything that happened after. But this is the real truth, the real story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Israeli consul offered the audience a way to carry that remembrance beyond the walls of the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree years later, we carry the memory of those murdered on Oct. 7 and those lost in the war that followed. \u2026\u201d said Shoshan. \u201cWhen you get home, I ask you to take a few minutes to find a name, look for a face, a story \u2026 then share that story with somebody else. That is how we remember the people behind the numbers.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years after Oct. 7, 2023, the date still carries a weight that is difficult to put into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,116482,31274,116481,116480,116479,12008,27],"class_list":["post-467838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-houston-synagogues","tag-jewish","tag-jewish-herald-voice","tag-jewish-news","tag-jhv","tag-newspaper","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}