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Novel ‘newspaper’ offers hopeful post-Oct. 7 visions

In 50,000 issue print run, bereaved families and others pen articles featuring reports they’d like to see in Israel in six months’ time

Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter

The Day That Will Come. (Screenshot)
The Day That Will Come. (Screenshot)

The hostage deal in Gaza is bringing an end to the war, while creating the conditions for an agreement with Saudi Arabia; as the government turns its eyes toward social needs, the minimum wage will rise substantially; a new (female) finance minister will bring the cost of living down by 15 percent; with international relations thawing, Ronaldo, Messi, and Taylor Swift will soon visit the country; and Israel has been chosen to host the 2034 soccer World Cup.

If only….

The headlines come from a new Hebrew “newspaper” titled “The Day That Will Come,” the first issue of which is dated June 1, 2025.

Most of the writers are members of families bereaved on or after October 7, 2023.

“Our hopes over the past 15 months have shrunken to not wanting to hear another siren today, or another radio item about another Israeli soldier who has fallen fighting,” explained Roni Neumann, whose son gave him the idea for a newspaper of hope, after seeing something similar published in the US during its war in Iraq.

“The idea of the newspaper is to enable people to lift their heads and hope for something much better, to start by imagining a better future,” he went on. “The project has shown just how thirsty people are for hope.”

Neumann’s niece Rotem was murdered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists massacred revelers at the Supernova party near the Gaza border, as part of a killing spree that left some 1,200 people dead and 251 abducted to the Gaza strip.

Rotem Neumann (used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Originally working in tech and more recently involved with environmental issues (such as the Clean Money Forum, which he helped create), he dropped everything after his niece’s death to work with other bereaved families. Projects have included a wandering exhibition featuring excerpts from 23 (real) newspaper articles published before October 7, “to show how the writing was on the wall [about Hamas’s plan to invade] and nobody wanted to see it.”

With the new project, hundreds of volunteers throughout the country have distributed almost 50,000 physical copies of the paper (financed by friends and a crowdfunding campaign) at places such as railway stations and cafes. The volunteers “came out of nowhere,” Neumann said, in response to a call for help shared on the Whatsapp messaging app and X.

“When we gave out the papers, and people started reading, some smiled, and some were close to tears and hugged the distributors. You saw how much we need to believe things can be different here,” he said.

In this recent, undated, photo, Roni Neumann takes shelter during a siren for an incoming rocket. (Courtesy)

The paper eschews politics. “There’s nothing for or against Netanyahu,” Neumann noted. “There’s just [a picture] of a better reality that is possible with a government that focusses on what’s good for most of the public: dealing with the high cost of living, crime in the Arab sector, getting more women into positions of power, improving education and health.”

Neumann said he had received thousands of responses, including offers to translate the paper into French and Arabic. Teachers in at least four schools were using it in class to stimulate debate about the future, he added, while a group of Polish academics had heard about it and planned to issue something similar in their country.

Readers have already submitted a pool of ideas for a potential second issue, though no decision has been made on that. These range from a railway line from Egypt’s Alexandria to Syria’s Damascus running through Israel and Beirut, with an extension to Istanbul (partly based on restoring the old Hejaz railway); artistic collaborations between young Israelis and Iranians; a new law allowing civil marriage in Israel; and a steep drop in violence against women.

Though he kept the project apolitical, Neumann, a former member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, noted his distaste for the Israeli leader.

“I come from a right-wing home, but one with the values of (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky,” he said, referencing the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement.

“Netanyahu governments lost their values a long time ago, reaching a nadir with the present government. I don’t think Netanyahu is rightwing. He does what’s good for him personally,” he said.

“I was educated on hope, on songs like ‘the day will come when there will be peace,’” Neumann went on. “Today, all they tell us is there will always be war, we can’t lose, and if we do, we’re giving a prize to our enemies. We want to show that life is possible in a different way.”

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