'This is something that people are seeking and need'

One year after Oct. 7, a Yom Kippur ritual of communal mourning takes on fresh meaning

Leaders try to find ways to ritualize grief, with some putting out supplements to the usual prayers that focus on the tragedy and 12 months of conflict with no end in sight

Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-in-chief of JTA

A public bomb shelter where Israelis were murdered during the October 7 massacre one year ago, on a road near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, September 19, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
A public bomb shelter where Israelis were murdered during the October 7 massacre one year ago, on a road near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, September 19, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

JTA — In 2001, Yom Kippur fell on September 26, two weeks after the terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. By then, the major denominations had already written special prayers to be said during Yizkor, a prayer service in memory of the dead. The Reform movement posted a prayer in the style of the liturgy said for Jewish “martyrs” and Holocaust victims during the traditional service. “Remember all those who were lost in the terror of that day,” it read. “Grant their families peace and comfort for Your name’s sake.”

Yom Kippur begins this year on October 11, four days after the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, and once again rabbis and liturgists are trying to find ways to ritualize raw communal grief on the holy day. A number of groups have put out supplements to the High Holiday prayer book, known as the mahzor, containing reflections, prayers and whole services addressing the mourning and anguish around the day and subsequent 12 months of a crisis that shows few signs of fading.

The entire cycle of this year’s High Holidays is haunted by October 7, especially Simhat Torah, the season’s climax: Hamas breached Israel’s southern fence on the holiday last year, and congregations have been struggling with how to celebrate what is supposed to be a joyous holiday on what is essentially the yahrzeit, or death anniversary, of some 1,200 victims of the attack and the anniversary of the abduction of 251.

But Yom Kippur too presents challenges after a traumatic year for Jews. The Yizkor service, said during various holidays throughout the year, is often seen as an opportunity for people to commune personally with their own close losses: a parent, a spouse, a child. How do you balance the personal nature of what is supposed to be a day of introspection with the communal grief over a devastating attack?

Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed said she had that balance — others might say contradiction — in mind when she wrote a “Yizkor for the Victims Of October 7th” for the Conservative movement.

“You never want to overshadow and make people feel like their personal loss is not being measured in the context of the communal struggles we have,” said Reiss Medwed, a teaching professor emerita of Northeastern University. And yet Yizkor, she added, “is not a static experience. It transforms itself over your lifetime and across your losses. And it can go from being anything from intensely dramatic and challenging to something that is a sweet opportunity to lovingly recall grandparents who passed at a ripe old age.”

A makeshift memorial to the victims of October 7, featuring candles and the Hebrew word ‘Yizkor,’ or remembrance, in Ashdod, Israel, November 20, 2023. (Maqaf-Ivri/Wikimedia Commons/ via JTA)

Her five-page service includes a call-and-response catalog of victims of October 7 — including “peace-loving youngsters” and “foreign workers” — that echoes the “Eleh Ezkerah,” or Martyrology, recited on Yom Kippur. There is a recitation of the kibbutzim and villages that were attacked and an adaptation of the traditional “El Maleh Rachamim” memorial prayer that refers to those who “were cruelly slaughtered on that fateful Simchat Torah.”

Rabbi Joel Pitkowsky of Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey (where, full disclosure, I am a member), said he will use parts of Reiss Medwed’s liturgy on Yom Kippur. Pitkowsky also saw a challenge in observing Yom Kippur as a day of personal introspection and repentance,  and acknowledging “where we are as a Jewish people right now.”

“How do I focus on making myself a better person — all of that work that goes into Yom Kippur,” he said, “and how do I hold on to the incredible, powerful, meaningful and unbelievably sad place where we find ourselves in Jewish history?”

The answer, he suggested, is found in the traditional Yom Kippur liturgy itself, where even personal sins are confessed in the plural, and historical tragedies are recalled in the Martyrology. “Judaism embraces the creative tension between the individual and the group,” he said.

Illustrative: A man blows a shofar, a ram’s horn, marking Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, overlooking the port of Haifa, Israel, October 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Rabbi Naomi Levy, who wrote a Yizkor meditation for October 7, doesn’t see balancing personal mourning and communal grief over the attacks and the war as a “challenge.”

“It’s a responsibility,” said Levy, who leads the independent Nashuva congregation in Los Angeles. Mourning October 7 “is something people are seeking and need.”

Services at Nashuva will include private time for worshipers to remember a loved one, followed by prayers for the victims of October 7.

The prayer she wrote asks God to remember the victims, and to give strength to those who mourn them. “God of the broken-hearted, God of the living, God of the dead, send comfort and strength to the grieving, send hope to the children, send healing to Israel,” it reads.

Other supplements written for the first Yom Kippur Yizkor since the attacks hit similar notes, with perhaps different emphasis. Binyamin Holzman’s prayer for the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Ritual Center includes a reference to the biblical character Job, who prayed that the earth would not “cover his blood” and let the injustice of his suffering be forgotten. In a supplement from Svivah, the Jewish women’s empowerment group, Rabbi Melanie Levav writes that Yizkor is necessary because it gives words for mourning a tragedy like October 7 for which “there are no words.”

At Beth David, a Reform congregation in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a Yom Kippur afternoon “Yizkor/Memorial Service for 10/7 Victims” will “shift from personal mourning to our communal mourning.”

And some groups will take the rituals of Yizkor to mark October 7 to make a pointed political statement. A coalition of left-wing Jewish groups deeply critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza — including Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace — are holding “a mass public ritual of remembrance, refusal, and recommitment” in Brooklyn on Yom Kippur. “This Yom Kippur, let us turn our most holy of holy days into a mass mourning and collective atonement,” reads the announcement of the event, called “Yizkor.”

A local business in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, displays an Israeli flag and signs in solidarity with Israel in its shop windows, September 27, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Such politicization of Yizkor will be rare in United States synagogues, however. Rabbi Joel Levenson of Midway Jewish Center in Syosset, Long Island, is typical of many rabbis when he said he doesn’t think his congregants are coming to Yom Kippur services “for the political analysis.”

“As a rabbi I am looking to lead and speak to a congregation of 1,500 and illuminate the power of Torah, which has spoken to our people over our centuries,” he said.

Levenson is adding an innovation to remember October 7: Yizkor is also said on Shemini Atzeret, the penultimate holiday in the High Holiday cycle, and one that coincides with the celebration in Israel of Simchat Torah. Levenson said his synagogue will hold a special Yizkor service on the evening before, to emphasize the discord between the usually joyous holiday and the massacres that took place on it in 2023.

“That evening of Shemini Atzeret will be a space for traditional prayers of Yizkor, but more truly dedicated to a space within a ritual framework to remember and honor those who lost their lives,” he said.

And for his congregation, the anniversary is both communal and personal: Omer Neutra, who was taken hostage on October 7 while serving as a tank commander near Gaza, grew up in the synagogue starting in preschool.

Most Popular
read more: