‘Bring Them Light’ billboard brings Oct. 7 victims to Times Square

For the last two months, two giant billboards in New York City’s Times Square have projected the faces of the October 7 victims, reflecting their lives before the 2023 Hamas terror attack that cut their lives short.

Stretching some 60 inches high, the billboards on Duffy Square, at Broadway between 46th and 47th streets, feature the faces of the victims, including soldiers and civilians, parents and children, young adults and grandparents.

The images were put in place before the second anniversary of October 7, and — for now — will remain in the iconic high-traffic Manhattan location.

“It’s not a quick glimpse at a life, it’s a deep, tender remembrance,” said clinical psychologist Lihie Gilhar, who initiated the project, called “Bring Them Light,” adding: “It’s a remarkable moment of visibility and remembrance.”

Gilhar, a Tel Aviv resident, wasn’t working with bereaved families after October 7, but she felt instinctively that those who were murdered would quickly vanish from the public eye, mourned only by their families and friends.

She began working on various memorial ideas in November 2023 with a group of other women, and initially came up with an installation for Tel Aviv.

With permission from the Tel Aviv Municipality, Gilhar raised money through crowdfunding and worked with a producer and lighting company Led Society to create the Bring Them Light light bulb installation, each light representing one victim of Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The monument was installed at Habima Square for one month in October 2024, and Gilhar is still seeking a permanent home for the installation.

She then took the project further, taking to social media to create enduring memorials and commemorations of those killed. Gilhar met with bereaved families and created videos about their loved ones. They sent her clips and photos, and she translated their descriptions into English for each of the videos, which are each from 5-9 minutes long.

Working with other volunteers — including Stephan Von Falkenstein, who creates the videos and Carrie Sanders, who built the website — Gilhar has created 298 videos so far of the approximately 1,200 victims of the attack.

As each video is created, it’s shared on the Bring Them Light Instagram account.

Now some of those images shared by the bereaved families are featured on the Times Square billboards, which Gilhar described as a moment for pedestrians, tourists and commuters to stop and look at the faces and images.

More than two million people have viewed the videos so far, with hundreds visiting the website, said Gilhar.

One such Instagram viewer connected Gilhar with the New York family that owns the Times Square billboard space, who offered it to her at a steeply discounted price.

“The campaign at Times Square is a miracle,” said Gilhar.

Meanwhile, she continues to gather the stories of the victims and keeps creating videos, averaging about two a day.

“The loss is endless, there is no win, and there never will be,” said Gilhar. “But there can be memory.”