The names, the families, and the responsibility to remember

Three years after 7 October it still feels like it happened yesterday, or was just a nightmare we needed to wake up from and were never able to. 

For Israelis and Jews around the world, it has become a day of remembrance: a day to recall lives taken, families shattered, communities transformed, and people who were taken from their homes, sometimes in their pyjamas, and held hostage. 

On that morning, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a coordinated assault from Gaza into southern Israel. They killed more than 1 200 people, the overwhelming majority civilians, and abducted hundreds and took them to Gaza. They deliberately injured, mutilated, tortured, raped, beheaded, and killed civilians, and took hostages, the youngest nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, who was brutally murdered in captivity. 

Numbers and statistics, however, can never tell the whole story. 

There was Gil Taasa, a father who jumped on a grenade to save his two sons Koren and Shai. There was Romi Swisa, a six-year-old who saw her parents shot in front of her and her three-year-old sister, Lia. And, of course, there were the families of the hostages, many of whom I had the privilege to meet in person when they came to plead with tears to French leaders, as they did all over the world to anyone who would listen, “Help us get our family members out of the hands of Hamas.” 

As we commemorate the first Remembrance Day on which there are no more hostages in Gaza, I would like to mention the families I met personally, who did everything in their power to bring their loved ones back. I still remember how I kept asking them where they got their strength to continue, often to receive the reply “We have no other choice”. Cohen, Angarest, Kalderon, Yahalomi, Kooper, Adar, Nimrodi, Kupershtein, Bohbot, Miran, Sharabi, Shtivi, Samerano, Idan, Shoham, Elziadna, Talalka, Yerushalmi, Danino, Shem, Toledano – a small portion of the hundreds of families that had to live through this unbearable reality – you will always be in my mind and heart. 

For the Jewish community in South Africa, these events were not distant. Like communities across the diaspora, its members experienced 7 October through the people they knew and loved: relatives, friends, colleagues, congregants, and friends in Israel. The sense of vulnerability created by that day reached far beyond Israel’s borders. 

Remembrance matters because too quickly the world forgot about 7 October and started blaming Israel for all world’s problems once again. Some went so far as to insinuate that Israel allowed the attacks to occur, in order to use that as an excuse to start a war. There were other vile conspiracy theories. 

Universal concern for human life must include the Jewish lives lost on 7 October and beyond. It must include the families who continue to carry grief, and it must include the men and women who went through mutilation and sexual abuse during the events of that day and in captivity. 

The South African Jewish community has demonstrated repeatedly that remembrance is not simply an act of looking backwards. It is an expression of solidarity: gathering in synagogues and community centres, lighting candles, saying Kaddish, supporting families, and creating spaces where testimony can be heard. 

The Embassy of Israel in South Africa has participated in such commemorations alongside members of the Jewish community and other faiths. Last year, for example, the gathering in Johannesburg was an opportunity both to honour those who were killed and to recognise those who had returned from captivity. 

For Jewish communities, remembrance has a particular meaning. We know what happens when the world forgets names. We know the danger of allowing the murder of Jews to become a footnote, explained away by circumstances or absorbed into a larger political argument. 

October 7 deserves neither simplification nor silence. 

It deserves remembrance. 

It deserves the telling of survivors’ stories. 

It deserves recognition of the families who continue to grieve. 

And it deserves a commitment to a future in which Jewish children can live openly and safely, in Israel and throughout the diaspora, without fear that their identity makes them legitimate targets. 

Memory cannot change what happened that morning. But memory can determine whether those who were lost remain present in the conscience of those who came after them. 

On this anniversary, we remember the victims by name and by story. We remember the families whose lives were changed forever. We remember those who were taken hostage, returning in person, or too many times, in a coffin. And we reaffirm the simple principle at the heart of Jewish remembrance: every human life has a name, a family, and a story – and none should be forgotten. 

• Hen Feder is the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Israel in South Africa. Prior to this he was the spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in France.