They betrayed us and we grew stronger

Three years ago this week, Simchat Torah, a day we set aside for dancing with the Torah, became the darkest day in Jewish life since the Holocaust. In the days that followed, the numbers settled: more than 1 200 people murdered and 251 taken into Gaza. It took us weeks to absorb the scale of it. In some ways, I am not sure we ever fully have. Still today, three years later, new details keep emerging and the scale of the horror continues to expand. 

Psychologists Dr Miri Bar-Halpern and Dr Jaclyn Wolfman have given a name to what so many of us felt in the months that followed, “traumatic invalidation”. In their research, they describe how Jews, “rather than being met with compassion and care”, were “instead met with a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding, and even outright denying the atrocities of 7 October along with any emotional pain stemming from them”. When I read that, I recognised our own community. The trauma was real. So was the second wound, the sense that our grief was not permitted, or was somehow suspect. 

We have seen our trauma disregarded. Spaces set up for the express purpose of protecting victims met our tragedy with ambivalence, disdain, and disbelief. The victim was turned into the aggressor, and every evil was justified through a lens of resistance, anti-imperialism, or misappropriated human rights. 

Here in South Africa, that denial took a very physical form. Within a month, the billboard the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) put up for the hostages was torn down at gunpoint. Posters of kidnapped children and grandparents were ripped down as quickly as they went up. The message, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, was that we should keep our heads down and our grief to ourselves. 

We did not. A community that might have made itself smaller chose instead to be loud and proud. In November 2023, we lined the Nelson Mandela Bridge with hundreds of red balloons and the faces of the hostages, so that Joburgers on their way to work could stop and hear their stories. We plastered the Ponte building with an Israeli flag, and took hostage posters to the beach in Durban. Our students at the University of the Witwatersrand held a vigil for all to see and hear. 

On the first anniversary of the attacks, nearly 40 community organisations, from youth movements and schools to shuls and women’s groups, built installations for a 7 October Square among the trees at the Great Park Synagogue in Johannesburg. When a violent convoy arrived to intimidate visitors, our community sang and danced. Their hatred and attempts to other us only built unity. Crucially, a large media contingent also visited the 7 October Square, allowing us to tell the story in our own words. We refused to have our story rewritten. 

One installation simply asked visitors to complete the sentence “After October 7 I am feeling”. So many wrote “proud”, “stronger”, and “more Jewish”. I believe this speaks to something I’ve felt personally and heard from so many others: that Hamas’s terror and the world’s apathy about Jewish suffering only strengthened Jewish identity. 

The return of the hostages was the turning point. When the remaining living hostages came home last October, and when the body of Ran Gvili, the last hostage, was finally returned for burial in January, after 843 days, it felt as though we could breathe again. We went back to the bridge, this time with blue balloons and a yellow sticker on every poster: came home alive, home for burial. As SAJBD national director Wendy Kahn said at the time, the relief was real, but the faces on those posters reminded us of the loss and the cruelty. 

We cannot speak honestly about the past three years without acknowledging the devastating toll of the war in Gaza. What we will not accept is the ongoing attempt to erase 7 October. On Saturday, days before the anniversary, thousands marched along the Sea Point promenade in protest at the “genocide” in Gaza. Staging a march like this on the eve of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, whatever its stated purpose, sends a clear message: that Jewish suffering does not count. One speaker complained that people still “have the audacity” to ask about 7 October. And to that speaker we say yes. We will always remember 7 October for what it was: the darkest day for Jews in 80 years, and a singularly evil event characterised by murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. 

The same impulse has been turned on our Holocaust centres. Last October, activists protested outside the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Durban centre has been targeted too, with demands that these institutions take up a political campaign against Israel. To picket a memorial to six million murdered Jews in order to cast Jews as today’s perpetrators is a cruel inversion. And placing a tiny fringe group of Jews to front the protest in no way diminishes its antisemitic foundation. 

Three years on, we are dancing again. Our shuls are full and our young people walk in Johannesburg as proud, identifiable Jews. Yet the world will never be quite the same, and neither will we. We have learnt the pain of ambivalence from those who should have stood with us, we have learnt who actually stands with us, and we have learnt that we can stand on our own. 

May the next anniversary find us all in a gentler world. 

• Karen Milner is national chairperson of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.