October 7 is a difficult anniversary as the Jewish High Holidays begin: NPR

A cloth-covered table with the Loyola Marymount Hillel logo on the front and six portraits of slain hostages on it.

Jason DeRose/NPR

Hide caption

Toggle label

Jason DeRose/NPR

On the table outside Rabbi Zachary Zysman’s office at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles lie six portraits of hostages killed by Hamas, weighted with a small stone placed there as a memento.

Nearby, a stack of brochures for a Krav Maga self-defense course lean against a pad of paper on which people can write prayers that will eventually be inserted into the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Zysman, the chaplain for Jewish life at Loyola Marymount, has been carefully preparing for the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown Wednesday, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, later this month. Midway through the Jewish High Holidays, October 7 marks the anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

No matter when the one-year anniversary fell, it would have been difficult, but Zysman said it was particularly poignant “at a time when we are reflecting on repentance, renewal and hope.”

His herd is small but close-knit. Loyola Marymount is a Jesuit university with approximately 10,000 students, 375 of whom are Jewish.

“One of the messages I repeated to my students over and over again is: What responsibility do we have to each other?”

“Who should live?” After October 7th it sounds different

Along with other chaplains on campus, Zysman has hosted lecture series, workshops and panels on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia over the past year, but the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will be less about education and more about personal and communal religious devotion for students.

The motif of death is common in High Holiday liturgies, and Zysman said “Who shall live?” and “Who shall die?” take on a deeper resonance this year.

According to the Israeli government, more than 1,200 Israelis died in the October 7 Hamas attacks, not all of whom were Jewish, and 100 Israelis remain held hostage by Hamas. According to Palestinian health authorities, the ensuing Israeli bombardment killed more than 41,500 people in Gaza.

Maya Golban, a senior at Loyola Marymount, says she has been thinking about the lives — and deaths — of so many people since Oct. 7.

“I personally cannot change the policies in the Middle East, but I can honor the people who lost their lives.”

Golban said she has become much more active in Jewish groups on campus over the last year, where she sometimes feels like she gets defensive and has to repeatedly justify her faith.

As the High Holidays began, she said she continued to pray for “the peace and security of everyone in the region: Israelis, Palestinians and Bedouins.”

Students focus on intensive spiritual preparation

In the weeks leading up to the High Holidays, Rabbi Jocee Hudson taught a lunchtime class on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the rabbi at the Hillel Jewish Center, just across the street.

“Welcome everyone. Let’s put our feet on the ground,” Hudson said as students ate the vegan enchiladas provided by Hillel while others snuck in at the last minute. “As we gather, the question for today is, ‘What is on your mind?'”

Hudson opened the course by leading the group of about ten through a centering exercise.

“We are rooting ourselves in the presence.” She said: “We are rooting ourselves right here now. As we say, the blessing of Torah study.”

Together, the class recited the Hebrew prayer, which translates to: “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who sanctifies us and commands us to study the words of the Torah.”

Participants in this course include senior student Dylan Julia Cooper.

“Right after Oct. 7,” she said, “we had a memorial service on campus that was so beautiful.” And it was also very hard because people came to protest. And it was really hard for me in my grief to hold my crying friends in my arms and know that people were protesting 20 feet away.”

Cooper, who is studying anthropology and theater, said it has been a year of perseverance and that Oct. 7, which falls in the middle of the High Holidays, “serves as a reminder of how much we can endure as a community, as a universe.”

Cooper said he used the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah to figure out how to let go of disillusionment with the protests.

“My Jewish friends, my Muslim friends, my Palestinian friends, my Israeli friends,” Cooper says, “I want them all to feel supported and loved by me.” And I don’t think it’s a good way to go to hold onto my anger or hold my grudge.”

Sitting next to Cooper in class was Matan Marder Friedgood, a junior at USC. He described last year as a nervous year.

“I have a friend who is not Jewish and is taking a Jewish studies course,” he said. “She says, ‘Oh, Matan, you’re Jewish!’ And I feel myself tense. I’m like, ‘What’s this about?’ What’s going to happen?”

But in this story it turns out that he was more worried than necessary.

“She asks herself, ‘What is a Shabbat morning service?’ That’s the most harmless question,” he said. “That was the year in a nutshell: ‘You’re Jewish.’ Uh oh.”

But for Marder Friedgood, that intensity meant he discovered something about himself that surprised him.

“My connection to Judaism has become stronger because of the pressure that has been placed on it,” he said. And my connection to other Jews has become stronger because of the pressure. And I’m much more willing to embrace it publicly.”

Students seek opportunities for “Jewish joy”

Marder Friedgood wondered how he and his community can put aside the fear and anxiety of the past year and welcome the Jewish New Year with kindness.

“How do we bring back Jewish joy?” he asked himself. “How do we just reintegrate all the positives — everything it means to be Jewish, all the great things, all the reasons we love it — while enduring the sadness and heartache?”

These are questions that many Jews ask themselves in the run-up to the High Holidays and October 7th. These are questions to which there are no easy answers.

“It was only through experiences of very real grief that I understood the capacity for very real joy,” said Hillel Rabbi Jocee Hudson. “This comes in the context of the period after October 7, when all of us in the Jewish community experienced deep sadness.”

“As we have witnessed tens of thousands of Palestinians also killed, we are continually concerned,” she said. “And there are students who have a deep reaction to this – deep moral outrage.”

This outrage is also why preparations for the High Holidays have been so intense this year.

“When our hearts break open with grief,” Hudson said, “there are two options: one is to retreat.” The other is to reach out. And that is the spiritual work.”

It’s spiritual work that demands a lot from 19, 20 or 21 year olds. But it’s spiritual work that college student Matan Marder Friedgood wants to help his community work together, even on Oct. 7 itself. He and a roommate are planning a vigil on the University of Southern California campus that day.

“We’re both musicians, so we try to enliven the room by creating – I think we have a ten-piece band trying to play Israeli and Jewish music – an atmosphere that has all the sadness and all the heartache in it carries and all the anger. And we look to the future.”

It is a future – a new year – marked by the hope of peace and not the carnage of war. Marder Friedgood plans to end the vigil by teaching those gathered to sing a peace prayer in Hebrew.

It is the final line of the medieval prayer known as Kaddish. One translation says: “Whoever creates peace in the heavens – may he bring peace to us and to all the people of Israel. Let us say ‘Amen’.”