Three Years Since October 7: People, Strength and Generosity
Nirit Eylon- Hatikvah President
There are days in our lives that divide time into a before and an after. We remember where we were, what we were doing, who called us, and the moment we first understood that something had happened that would change us forever.
For Jews around the world, October 7 became one of those days. A day we will always remember not only for the horror of what happened, but for where we were when we first understood that something unimaginable was unfolding in Israel.
Three years have passed since that morning. It is difficult to comprehend, because in some ways October 7 feels like yesterday, while in others it feels as though we have lived a lifetime since.
I remember those first hours in Melbourne: the disbelief, the frantic messages, the desperate attempts to understand what was happening thousands of kilometres away. We were watching our families, our friends and our country experience something we could barely comprehend. Yet almost immediately, alongside the fear and grief, something else began to happen.
People stepped forward.
Across Melbourne, and across Australia, Israelis and Australian Jews mobilised with an urgency and unity I had never experienced before. People who had never considered themselves activists suddenly became organisers and volunteers. Community organisations worked alongside one another. People opened their homes, their businesses, their networks and their wallets. They packed boxes, sourced equipment, organised flights, raised money and found ways to reach people in Israel who needed help.
United With Israel warehouse became one small expression of something happening throughout the Jewish world. People arrived carrying bags and boxes. Others stayed for hours sorting, packing and preparing equipment to be sent to Israel. Volunteers came back day after day. What began as an emergency response grew into something much larger, supporting evacuated communities, soldiers, families and children whose lives had been turned upside down.
At the same time, another mobilisation was taking place. Across Australia, thousands of people stood with the families of the hostages. Week after week, we gathered, marched, spoke their names and carried their photographs. We refused to allow people we had never met to disappear into statistics. Their families became part of our lives, and their fight became ours.
Over the past three years, United With Israel has sent 26 tonnes of essential equipment to Israel, supported 30 evacuated communities and delivered dozens of projects, including extensive mental health programs and the establishment of a mental health support centre. More than 1,000 volunteers across Australia took part in 104 Bring Them Home events.
Those numbers tell part of the story. But they are not the part I remember most.
I remember the people.
One story in particular has stayed with me.
We had already completed a project to establish a mental health rehabilitation centre for children from Kibbutz Zikim when Orit, United With Israel's representative in Israel, was delivering supplies to evacuated families from the kibbutz. During one of those deliveries, she began talking to the driver. He told her he was from Kibbutz Manara, on Israel's northern border.
At the time, Manara was under almost constant fire from Lebanon. The kibbutz had been evacuated and virtually every home had been damaged. Because the area had been declared a closed military zone, regular firefighting services could not simply enter when fires broke out. The members of the local emergency response team were protecting what remained of their community while also fighting the fires caused by the attacks.
And they barely had the equipment to do it.
The entire team was sharing extremely limited protective and firefighting equipment. The same people responsible for defending their homes were also trying to stop those homes from burning.
We verified what was needed directly with Manara's emergency response team and community, and put out a call for help in Australia.
Within 24 hours, the money was there.
We were able to purchase an additional set of tactical protective clothing for every member of the emergency response team, together with a full container of firefighting equipment, including a water trailer that was purchased in northern Israel.
Most of the people who donated had never met the men fighting those fires. Many had never been to Manara. Until the day before, some may never even have heard of the kibbutz. None of that mattered. They heard that people in Israel needed them, and they responded.
For me, that small story captures something much bigger about these past three years.
There has been so much darkness since October 7. We have mourned people we loved and people we never knew. We have waited for hostages to come home and stood beside families living through the unimaginable. We have watched a long and painful war unfold. Here in Australia, we experienced a level of antisemitism many of us never expected to see in our streets, universities and communities. And then, in December last year, that hatred reached its most horrific expression when Jews celebrating the first night of Chanukah at Bondi Beach were attacked simply for gathering as Jews. Fifteen people were murdered, and more than 40 were wounded.
But even in that terrible moment, the connection that had carried us through the years since October 7 flowed in both directions. For three years, Australian Jews had stood beside Israel through its darkest days. After Bondi, Israel stood beside us. Israeli teams with deep experience in responding to terrorism came to Australia to support our community, bringing expertise particularly in trauma and mental health, and in helping communities navigate the aftermath of such an attack. At a moment when our own community was grieving and shaken, Israel did not simply send messages of solidarity. It sent people to stand with us, support us and share what it had learned through its own painful experience. We belonged to one another.
We have also witnessed deep divisions within Israel and within the Jewish world itself. Three years later, people are tired. We are not the same people we were on October 6, 2023, and perhaps we never will be.
But something else has survived these three years.
Yesterday, as I was thinking about what I wanted to write on this anniversary, another extraordinary story unfolded, this time thousands of metres above the ground.
Flydubai flight FZ1073 was travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv when, according to Israeli authorities and passenger accounts, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. The captain was stabbed repeatedly, and the plane suddenly lost almost 14,000 feet of altitude in less than 30 seconds.
Despite his injuries, the captain managed to unlock the cockpit door. Passengers and crew responded. Among them were three Israelis who entered the cockpit and helped restrain the attacker. One of them, Yaniv Hayun, described taking hold of the controls and helping to stabilise the aircraft until qualified pilots could take over. A medical professional treated the wounded captain, while, by an extraordinary coincidence, another Flydubai crew was travelling on the aircraft and was able to assume control. The plane landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
The investigation into exactly what happened and the attacker's motive is continuing, and there will be more to learn. But one part of the story is already clear.
The people on that aircraft did not board it expecting to be heroes.
Neither did the people who walked into our Melbourne warehouse three years ago. Neither did those who stood week after week holding photographs of hostages they had never met. Neither did the people who heard that a tiny kibbutz on Israel's northern border needed firefighting equipment and, within 24 hours, made sure it had it.
Again and again over these three years, I have watched people confronted with moments in which they could have looked away, waited for somebody else, or decided that the problem was simply too large for them to solve.
Instead, they took responsibility for one another.
Perhaps that is what I understand differently about hope today.
Three years ago, hope may have meant believing that somehow things would be all right. I don't think that anymore. Too much has happened for that kind of innocence.
Hope is not the belief that someone else will fix what is broken. It is what we choose to do when things are broken. It is carrying a box, making a phone call, opening your home, donating to people whose names you did not know yesterday, standing beside a family you have never met, fighting a fire in a community that has been evacuated, or running towards a cockpit when every instinct might tell you to stay away.
Hope is the decision not to stand by.
On October 8, we will come together again in Melbourne to watch The National Memorial Ceremony | Families of October 7, broadcast from Israel. We will remember those who were murdered, those who were taken, the families whose lives changed forever, and a day that changed Israel and Jewish communities around the world.
But I hope we will also remember what the three years since that day have shown us.
We have been hurt. We have been divided. We have been exhausted. We have been forced to confront things about the world around us that many of us never imagined we would face in our lifetime.
And still, when someone needs us, people step forward.
That strength has carried us from October 7 until today. It lives in Israel, and it lives here in Melbourne, in a community that has shown again and again what it means to stand together and take responsibility for one another.
For me, that is no longer simply the meaning of hope.
It is Hatikvah.
Firefighting equipment Kbbitz Manara Kibbutz Manara - Israel North Warehouse project Unit with Israel
Comments