The massacre of October 7th on the Jewish Holiday of Simchat Torah. This historical episode will be spoken about in the futures years and decades as much as people will discuss the Holocaust. Of course, the scope of a one-day massacre of 1,200+ Israeli civilians as opposed to the systemized destruction of an entire race during World War II cannot be compared. However, what happened in that one fateful day was truly analogous to what happened on a single day during the early period of the Holocaust.
One of the most fateful days of the Holocaust took place before Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Around 10 months earlier, in November 1938, German citizens of all stripes and groups committed the single largest pogrom in Europe in many years. It became known as Kristallnacht, or the “night of the shattered glass.” All across Germany, Jewish storefronts, many of which were made of glass, were shattered, looted, and defaced with large swastikas of the Nazi Party in Germany.
Additionally, hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground, many of them with Jews inside of them. Jews were rounded up by the thousands and taken to concentration camps and tortured, many for months. In the end, more than 1,200 Jews were killed in the mega Pogrom. Any Jew who had fooled themselves into thinking that the German people would not actually kill Jews became fatally aware of how serious the intentions of the German people were.
But it was too late for many Jews to emigrate out of Germany. Some lucky ones found refuge, but they were the exceptions, and not the rule. Nearly every country turned its cheek and justified itself by looking at other countries who followed suit. Nobody truly cared. The Jewish people were alone to fend for themselves, and all they had were passports with nowhere to go.
Today, Israel experienced a modern-day Kristallnacht from the radical Muslim Nazis. However, the Jewish people have a place to go. The Jewish people have a well-trained and dedicated Army, and a country with more than 7 million Jews united to defend it. The ongoing miracle of the ingathering of the exiles has changed the world in a way that is irreversible. What happened in the 1940’s still exists today in aspiration. But the Jewish people have come back from the ashes to become a major powerhouse. October 7th was and will continue to be a painful reminder of the threats to Israel’s existence that have always existed and will always exist. But today, Israel fights back, and fights back hard.
