Yesterday [Sunday], the premiere screening of Noam Demsky’s film, “From Last Yom Kippur”, took place in Gush Etzion. The film was produced by the Har-Ezion Hesder Yeshiva for the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, in which the Yeshiva lost 8 students in battles at the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The film focuses on the image of Yeshiva’s head, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (the grandfather of Demsky’s wife), on the journeys he made to the fronts during the war and in the words he spoke at the time, and on the profound impact that the loss had on his leadership and his worldview.
Demsky began producing the film last year, when the current war broke out, similar to the Yom Kippur War in the circumstances of its outbreak. In the Iron Swords War, Har Etzion has so far lost seven of its students and graduates, a blow that is almost equal to 1973. Demsky decided to change the focus of the film, and to draw a comparison between Rabbi Amital’s leadership and that of Rabbi Yaakov Medan, the current head of the yeshiva. The two wars touched Rabbi Medan personally: In the Yom Kippur War he fought on the front lines and lost many friends, and in the current war his son Elisha was very badly wounded, was on the verge of death and lost both legs.
“In the Yom Kippur War, I saw the Shekhina on the battlefield. People are fighting fiercely, saying, ‘You will not pass,’ doing everything to help the people of Israel rise up in their land. And it is no less great than the splitting of the Sea and the vision of Mount Sinai,” Rabbi Medan said in the film. “In this war, I was not in the battlefield, but after my son’s rescue I felt that the Creator was holding my hand and telling me, ‘Don’t be afraid. Do not be afraid, my servant Jacob.” And I believe in him, and only ask that he keep holding my hand during this difficult time.”
There is no doubt that in the present war the members of the Hesder Yeshivas carried a significant part of the burden of war and losses, proving their value and dedication to the state. This is an example of a high-level Torah that does not come at the expense of belief in the need to protect the land and its inhabitants. “Since the days of Rabbi Akiva, nothing like this has happened,” Rabbi amital said in a famous speech in 2008, which is also shown in the film, “that yeshiva students went to war and returned to study Torah? An Historical phenomenon!”
