To the Editors:

Yom HaShoah is almost upon us. On this day, we stop and we remember.

Yom HaShoah follows Passover, which ironically celebrated the freedom and redemption of the Jewish people. But the enslavement of Jews is not in the past; it is also in the brutal and barbaric reality of the terror tunnels today in Gaza.

I was there in Israel last June, in the city of Ashkelon, just 5 kilometers from Gaza, listening  to the booms coming from the tunnels. All day and all night. And as Israelis live with the war, day and night, mourning the fallen, praying for their soldiers even as they did in peacetime, sirens are sounded, and missiles are caught by the Iron Dome.

Israel confronts a situation unlike any other country in the world — surrounded by countries that want to wipe it off the map, from the river to the sea. The Jewish community worldwide was shaken to its core on October 7, when Israel was attacked in the most horrifying way. When 1,250 citizens — men and women, including 36 children and infants — were murdered, burned alive, brutalized, raped, tortured and held hostage. Of those hostages, 59 still remain in Gaza, 18 months later.

And what was the world’s response to Oct 7? Silence. A deafening SILENCE, which was followed by Israel’s self-defense,  And Israel’s self-defense was then described as aggression.

We must speak up and speak out. As Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”

—Judith K. Weiner