One Day in October

Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach, One Day in October: Forty Heroes. Forty Stories (Jerusalem: The Toby Press, 2024).

While Political Zionism is fighting for its life and its reputation, Cultural Zionism is flourishing. As Israel faces its greatest existential crisis since the War of Independence, Israel writers and artists, poets and playwrights are doing their work and giving voice to the inner life of Israelis as they wrestle with all the issue raised by the Event and by the Wars that have followed.

I came in touch with this enormous cultural creativity as we searched with what we should read during the Yom Kippur Yizkor services and the Mussaf martyrology, Eleh Ezkearh,  The traditional liturgy powerful and poignant as it is, enduring for centuries, was insufficient this year. It could not work alone, not while the wounds were not only still fresh but ongoing. We faced the same issue again on Shmeni Atzeret, which is the actual Yahrzeit on the Hebrew Calendar of the murders of October 7 and once more on October 7^th and the memorial services that we held on the secular calendar on that awful date itself. The resources available from Israel were overwhelming, music and art, testimony, and literature. Those of us who went to the Nova exhibition also experienced that creativity in the powerful artifact and testimony driven exhibition that Los Angeles had the privilege of hosting during the summer and early fall months.

We are all post-October 7^th Jews, none more so than our Israeli brethren who have lived and breathed the pogrom, the war, and the hostage crisis for the past 15 months.

Two accomplished Israel writers Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach decided that they had to put their talents to use to confront the what happened on October 7^th. Wisely, they decided not to turn to their own artistry but to others’ testimonies, to listen and only then to write. They interviewed survivors and rescuers, parents, widows, orphans, fiancées, significant others, and siblings of the bereaved. The people who shared their stories came from diverse backgrounds, religious and secular, Jew and Muslims, Druze and Bedouin, police officers and ordinary soldiers, ambulance drivers and those who gather the bodies and body parts of the deceased to bring them to an appropriate burial. Rather than embellishing on their stories, they restrained themselves as tried as much as possible to tell the stories in the words. the tones and the ethos of how the story was told to them, understanding that they were not the subjects of the story but merely the midwives to the encounter with what happened on the dark day.

The result is a collection of 40 stories, each heroic in its own right, each relates a small fragment of what happened on the saddest day in Israeli history. The story of October 7^th became personalized, each account is vivid, each offers entre into the anguish of those terrible hours.

It has become cliché to say that they people of Israel are better than its government. Certainly, on that day, they proved more responsive and virtually each story adds another layer to the incompetence of the Israeli government and the IDF that day. As one reads of the kibbutzim that were overrun, the women who had their warnings unheeded,  the hours spent in the shelters awaiting someone, anyone other than the murderers, the collapse of communication systems, the inability of the IDF to coordinate a response, to get solider in place, one begins to get a picture of what happened and its cost in human pain and loss.  And yet, individual Israelis — and even their foreign helpers — put their lives on the line to fight the enemy, to rescue those who could be saved, to bring medical treatment to those who were wounded, to transport them to safety, and to treat those who had been murdered wantonly with dignity and with respect.

One cannot read this book in one, two, or three sittings as each story is emotionally draining even to this reviewer who routinely reads Holocaust testimonies. Each deserves a hard stop, the reflection that is needed to absorb and to grapple with such stories.

After one or two stories, one wonders: “have I heard enough?” ”Must I go one?” Yet the power of the narrative commands respect and demands perseverance. One must read this book slowly lest we become numb to the pain, or worse yet indifferent to the loss, accepting of the cruelty to the crimes and the magnitude of the government’s failures.

As we have learned from Holocaust testimonies that testimony is a most effective way, if not the most effective way of emotionally absorbing an event. And each of these stories offers us a way in.

I came away so grateful to Agmon and Mevorach for their heart wrenching and exhausting efforts to listen, to learn, and to share. It is not easy to read One Day in October, but it is essential.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.