Activists put photos of Oct. 7 victims on NYC streets as city’s Jews mourn anniversary

NEW YORK — A group of Jewish New Yorkers gathered at the southwest corner of Central Park on Tuesday night, placing stickers on their chests showing red anemone flowers, a symbol of southern Israel, and the date “10/7.”

Jewish community activist Elisha Fine distributed to each of the dozen attendees stacks of stickers showing victims of the October 2023 Hamas invasion, when thousands of terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

“We’ll be walking on Central Park West. We’re going to put up the faces of those killed on October 7 and we’re going to move as a group, pole to pole,” Fine said.

The project was one of the ways Jewish New Yorkers marked the third anniversary of the massacres in southern Israel. While the anniversaries the previous two years had focused on the plight of the hostages, this year, with no hostages remaining in Gaza, Jews in the city had more space to mourn and took differing approaches.

Commemoration activities scheduled for Wednesday ranged from the sticker activism to a hostage-themed art installation, a run in Central Park, and a push for a permament memorial by elected officials.

The Tuesday night event was organized by Hatikvah Collective, an informal activist group based in the city focused on “street craft,” mainly posting stickers around the city.

Sometimes, the stickers bear pro-Jewish or Zionist messages such as holiday greetings, and other times, the statements are ripostes to anti-Zionist activism in the city.

On Tuesday night, the group pasted stickers showing 500 victims of the October 7 attack. Each sticker showed a black and white photo of a different individual, with their name, nationality, a statement that they were “murdered on October 7th,” and, “May their memory be a blessing,” in English and Hebrew.

Hatikvah Collective grew out of the campaign to spread awareness of the hostages that began immediately after the Hamas attack. Jews and allies around New York affixed posters and stickers showing the hostages on the streets and subways. The images were often immediately torn down or defaced, leading to a “poster war” on the city streets.

Weekly hostage rallies in Central Park formed into a community, but dissipated when the hostages were released. Some members of that group have found communal outlets elsewhere, such as the Hatikvah Collective. The activists produce the stickers at home using thermal printers.

“When the hostages came home, baruch Hashem, many of us drifted away. We didn’t have a place to meet. Things had changed for us, but we knew the problem, especially in the Diaspora, was going to get worse. Antisemitism and especially anti-Zionism,” said Gabe Meister, an Upper West Side lawyer. “We really had to group together and figure out, ‘We have this energy and we have people who care,’ and these people now have to fight it here.”

The attendees on Tuesday night heard about the event in community messaging groups. They met at the corner of Central Park, next to a five-story monument topped with a gold statue commemorating the USS Maine, a US Navy ship that exploded in Cuba in 1898. A roller blading club gathered on the other side of the statue and a food cart selling falafel blasted hip hop from a pair of speakers.

“There was a point at which we put up the faces of the hostages, and that’s how we dealt with our ambiguous grief, and often real grief, because we were putting up the living and the dead sometimes, and we didn’t know,” Fine, wearing a sweatshirt showing Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, told the group. “Now we’re going to put up the faces of the dead, the faces of those that were murdered.”

“I hope we can think about, from name to name, because we have around 500 faces that are printed here — think about who we were before October 6, and who we want to be after October 8, which is now,” he said.

The group moved north alongside the park, plastering the faces onto lamp poles and traffic control boxes, from knee-height upward, next to advertisements for smoke shops and decals stating, “AI took my job.” Fine advised the group against covering up other stickers as a matter of “etiquette.”

“You put these up, you’re horrified that these people look just like you,” one woman said.

At one point, an angsty passerby walked down the sidewalk past the group, shouting about politics. Fine explained to him what the group was doing and gave him a sticker. The man added it to a lamppost.

“I respect that, my brother,” the man said. “I love you for what you’re doing out here. You’re my dude.”

Attendees said they felt compelled to join the project to mark the October 7 anniversary and that the intended audience was other Jews, the general public, and anti-Zionists.

“There’s an audience of Jews that we want to empower and let them know that we’re not gonna just sit down, and neither should they, and then there’s an audience of ‘the keffiyeh crew.’ We want them to know that we’re not going anywhere,” Meister said.

He added that many members of the general public do not “have any real sense of what happened” on October 7.

“The world forgot, and I’m not going to let them forget,” he said.

Doron Avrahami said he was “sticking stickers” for the first time. He was visiting from Rockland County, north of the city, and joined the campaign with friends who saw the event shared in a WhatsApp group.

“This is a way to attract attention to what the cause is of all the mayhem of the last few years,” he said. “What happened on October 7 is historical and it marks a shift in time, from one era to another, and this is a way just to remind people as they go about their daily life that, at the bottom of it all, a lot, a lot of people lost their lives.”

Fine repeatedly urged the group to stick together for safety reasons. Ahead of the gathering, an acquaintance of his stopped by and discussed a legal case against a local dog walker who repeatedly tore down hostage posters, harassed those posting them and got into physical altercations with Jewish activists.

During the Gaza war, several people posting hostage images in the city were assaulted, resulting in hate crime charges.

Elsewhere in the city, on Wednesday, Jewish groups will hold an array of events to mark the anniversary.

The running club “Nice Jewish Runners” will hold a “memorial run” in Central Park.

The UJA-Federation of New York and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum will unveil a public art installation made of pins and dog tags collected from hostage advocates. The sculpture was made by Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, the Israeli street artists who launched the hostage poster campaign.

The leftist group Israelis for Peace will hold a rally “mourning those killed on the day itself and since.”

Yeshiva University will host a talk by former hostage Omer Shem Tov.

Local Jewish elected officials, including City Council Speaker Julie Menin, will hold a press conference to push for the establishment of a permanent October 7th memorial site in Brooklyn.

Anti-Zionist groups are holding rallies and school walkouts to celebrate the Hamas attack.

At the end of the night, the sticker group took their anemone decals off their shirts, added the flower images to the last street pole, and gathered on a corner to sing Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” or “The Hope.”

“I feel sad and angry that I have to do it, but I feel compelled to do it because if I don’t, who’s gonna do it?” Meister said of the event. “There’s a wall between what the world sees and knows about Jews and what we actually are, and we have to bring that down.”