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The Family Ceremony of October 7: Pain for rebirth

The National Ceremony of Remembrance, October 7, Yarkon Park

On Monday evening, the National Ceremony for the 7th of October was held at the Yarkon Park. The ceremony was organized by bereaved families from that day (in which some 1,250 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed), as well as in the war in general. The ceremony was supposed to include an audience of tens of thousands of people; but warming of the war arenas led to restrictions by the Home Front Command, and the ceremony was reduced to only two thousand people in the audience, almost exclusively for bereaved families. Indeed, yesterday there were at least 4 alarms in Tel Aviv due to launches from various arenas (Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq), including one an hour before the ceremony, and another one an hour after it was over.

Despite the reduction of the audience, the power of the ceremony, which was guided by Enoch Daum and Rotem Selah, was not dull: The ceremony was intertwined with testimonies of survivors of the same day and relatives of fallen, along with sad performances of mourning songs with performances by the best singers of Israel (including Ivri Lider, Aviv Geffen, Miri Mesika, Keren Pels, Rita, Margol, Agam Buchbot, Zehava Ben, Ran Danker, Yehuda Poliker, Boaz Sharaabi, Shuli Rand, Eden Hasson, Yishai Levi, Gali Atari, Korine Elal, Shalom Hanoch and the ‘Jews’ Band). The most exciting moments were the ones in which the singers were integrated into the theme of the evening – such as in the joint performance of the ‘Church of the Mind’ band and of Amit Mann, the paramedic from Kibbutz Be’eri, to sing ‘Nothing will hurt me’; Or the joint performance of Shlomo Artzi and Yagil Ya’akov, who was released from the captivity of Hamas (and his father’s body is still in the Gaza Strip), to sing “Fields of Iris”.

In addition, relatives of fallen people spoke excitingly – when Jonathan Schmarys (the brother of the Hostage Alon, who fled from captivity and was killed on his return to the IDF lines) called for popular responsibility for a better future for the country, and when the widows of the fallen battalion commanders, Tomer Greenberg of the 13th Battalion and Salman Hevka of the 53 Battalion, carried Together a call for the influence of unity existing in the ranks of the army, out to the ranks of the people. In addition, white balloons were blown into the sky in memory of the fallen scouts, and yellow balloons for the scouts still in captivity. The ceremony was closed in the song of hope, ‘HaTikvah’, and in a call for the return of the hostages, and a new Israeli tradition may have begun.

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