Simchat Torah 5784: October 7 and the War
On the Shabbat of Simchat Torah, Hamas fighters broke into the border communities: about 1,200 killed and 251 taken hostage — the deadliest day for Jews since the Shoah.
The morning of 22 Tishrei 5784 was a Shabbat and the festival of Simchat Torah, the day the annual Torah cycle is completed and people dance with the scrolls. At 6:29 a rocket barrage began, and under its cover some three thousand Hamas fighters broke through the fence into the kibbutzim and towns of the western Negev — Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Kissufim, the town of Sderot, and the Nova music festival near Re'im.
In a single day about 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians including children and the elderly, and 251 were taken into Gaza. Many defended themselves: kibbutz security squads, police, ordinary people who drove to the south in their own cars. Reservists reported in numbers far beyond any plan, flying back from abroad.
The war that followed became the longest in the country's history, fought in Gaza, on the Lebanese border, and with Yemen and Iran, and accompanied by a sharp surge of antisemitism worldwide — on campuses, in European streets, online.
Inside Israel there was a countermovement: civic self-organisation on an unprecedented scale, thousands of volunteers, and a visible turn toward tradition — tzitzit, Psalms and prayer among people who had never done so. The fate of the hostages and the consequences of this war remain an open wound.