In the whirlwind of pain, the numbers from that Saturday are etched in stone: 1,194 people were murdered and killed in the Oct. 7 massacre. At least 3,300 were wounded. Some 38 children were murdered in the massacre, 20 children were orphaned from both parents. Some 251 men, women and children were kidnapped into Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip. Some 334 IDF soldiers fell on that day, 60 police officers, 10 Shin Bet personnel.

This was the entry point of the State of Israel into the Swords of Iron War. Since then, another 426 soldiers have fallen defending the homeland. Over 20,000 have been wounded. Some 117 hostages were released alive from captivity, the vast majority in the hostage deal at the end of November 2023, and a few in military operations. Another 37 of the murdered hostages were returned to Israel for burial. Still, 101 hostages are in Hamas tunnels in Gaza.

There is no measure and no logic

Why return and recite the numbers? Because they constitute an anchor and order within what cannot be ordered and described. They try to outline a framework for grief that has no measure and no logic.

Is there anyone among us who will banish from consciousness the body count of the first days? On Saturday night it was "at least 250 dead", then 500, and within a day we passed a thousand murdered. And since then it has grown and increased. What do 1,677 people look like? Sometimes they can be described sitting in a concert hall, or filling several passenger planes, or spending time a park. The mind tries to paint the complete, living picture, but the many details thwart the attempt.

The Israeli bereaved family is no longer just a family. It is no longer a separate, fenced and sanctified sector. It is almost a nation now. It is present in countless homes, in too many towns to count.

Faces and names

They have faces and names, and their stories flood the public space in Israel every day in the past year. Not just in the media and social networks, but also on street light poles, on house fences, in train stations, in large crowds arriving with flags and signs to performances, and even on staircases at tourist sites around the world. So great is the void, and so persistent is the willingness of Israelis to fill it and tell about it.

Trauma has no introduction and no preparation. The State of Israel that preceded Oct. 7, 2023, had never corresponded with murder and loss on similar scales. The largest massacre in the history of the state's days until that dark Saturday was the 1978 coastal road massacre, and it claimed the lives of 35 Israelis. That was 46 years ago. In the Passover massacre, the largest attack in the current millennium, 30 Israelis were murdered.

The immense loss gave birth to communities of blood ties, for life and death. Nova survivors and families of the female observervation soldiers are two examples that have been etched into consciousness this year. Small or large groups of people whose paths crossed on the most terrible day in the state's history. The "comradeship" of their loved ones was not in tanks or trenches, but in captivity apartments and tunnels in Gaza, in shelters and in safe rooms, in the wormwood bushes near the party complex in Re'im. Rare and mighty moments of humanity, of grace, of compassion, of courage.

And perhaps therein lies the power of the memory of Oct. 7: in the heroism that emerged from the battlefield and spread among friends, among family members, between adults and youth, between Israelis.

Like on the way to Jerusalem

From a distance of a year, what is the fear that Oct. 7 gave birth to? It was not fear of our enemies (we could handle them, and always will). It was the fear of the change that occurred within us. The massacre and its dimensions forced a change upon every Jew and Israeli, and not in this way – with the stroke of the sword – did we want to change.

Almost immediately we understood that we would become a different people, society and state. Israel of Oct. 6 is not Israel of Oct. 8 – for worse, and for better. Reality forced a change upon us, and alongside the awakening, the shattering of conceptions and the sobering – there was also planted the fear that we would be strangers to ourselves, that we would continue to long for who we were, and for who we could have been.

This change is also expressed in the Israeli subconscious. Paths between lush lawns and modest family homes in the kibbutz will never again be free from the shadows of the murderers who roamed between them on that morning; the stunning sunrises at nature parties will always hint at the masses of young people who fled for their lives; the shelters that knew terror and heroism will forever tell the Israeli bereavement, like the armored vehicles that were scattered from 1948 on the ascent to Jerusalem.

The Israeli present

In Jewish law, from the first anniversary of a person's death, their sons and daughters are exempt from the mourning customs that applied to them. Now they are allowed to participate in joyous events, to renew themselves with clothes and to remove additional mourning customs from themselves. They extricate themselves from the past toward rehabilitation and building forward, out of the sanctity of life.

For anyone who has experienced death up close, the memorial allows a retrospective look at the loss, an opportunity to come to terms with it or to repress it. It is a day that offers mental coping with an event that happened and ended – and whose implications are present in life.

Are we already there? It seems not. Our brothers and sisters are still held captive in Gaza, our sons and daughters are still in the midst of war. But we will rise from the crisis. The Jewish people, the Israeli nation, usually do not have time to process what was, or to dwell on what is happening, because the battle for tomorrow is already in full swing.

Oct. 7 is not an event from the past. It is still the Israeli present. We will not completely extricate ourselves from it. But we will continue on from it – different, other, stronger. Better. 

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President Isaac Herzog addressed the international gathering on Wednesday marking 80 years since the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 29-30, 1941 – one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of the Holocaust.

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Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and other leaders, Herzog took part in inaugurating the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

The BYHMC is being established to commemorate the stories of the 2.5 million Jews of Eastern Europe, including 1.5 million from Ukraine alone, who were murdered and buried in mass graves near their homes by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, when the city was under Nazi occupation in 1941. SS troops carried out the massacre with local collaborators.

In his speech, Herzog recited the Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead: "There is an ancient Jewish prayer called Yizkor. In the Jewish calendar, we usually recite Yizkor – the prayer to elevate the souls of the departed – be they relatives, or people whose deaths had national significance – on the most sacred dates and festivals for our people."

"This past month, we marked several of these occasions. With your permission, as President of the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish People, I would like to recite the Yizkor prayer, for the elevation of the souls of our brothers and sisters. Babies, children, women, men, and the elderly. Shot, massacred, and murdered in cold blood here, a place that became the biggest mass grave on European soil, in the valley of death of Babi Yar. In the most terrible tragedy to befall the Jewish People and the family of humanity, at mankind's darkest hour: the Holocaust. There was nobody to recite the Yizkor prayer for them.

"May God remember the souls of our brethren, Children of Israel, victims of the Holocaust and its heroes, the souls of the six million of Israel who were killed, murdered, suffocated, and buried alive and the holy communities destroyed for the sanctification of the Name. May God remember their binding, with the binding of all of Israel's other martyrs and heroes since time immemorial, and may he bind their souls up in the bond of life. Those gentle and beloved in their lives; in their deaths, not separated. May they rest in peace, and may we say Amen."

Herzog continued: "I come here as the President of the State of Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish People. I come here from Jerusalem, our eternal capital. In the heart of Jerusalem, in the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset – on the government floor is a painting by the painter Joseph Kuzkovsky, who was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kyiv. "Led to the Slaughter – Babi Yar" is its name."

"It shows men, women, and children, walking in silence, in deathly darkness, the jackboots of the Nazi devil and local police officers pointing their weapons at them, setting sharp-fanged dogs on them.

"In the middle of the painting – which nobody who has ever seen it, even once, can ever forget – is a woman, holding in one hand her young daughter, and in the other clutching her baby to her chest. Surrounded by parents and children, brothers and sisters, all together, on their way to their terrifying death. Here, in the heart of darkness.

"Thousands of times have I walked up those stairs, and time and again, I paused and looked at the picture. I felt a pinch in my heart, appalled by the atrocity. I thought about how at the end of that walk, these Jews were stripped naked, thrown into this valley of death, and massacred in a hail of bullets, here at Babi Yar.

"Every time leaders from around the world visited, I showed them this picture and told them the story of the massacre at Babi Yar. A chapter that must be studied till the last generation.

"There was no colder or more awful act of murder, no more murderous representation of the "Holocaust by bullets," than the Baby Yar Massacre.

"There is no escaping the terrible thought that the sun rose over this valley. The birds chirped. The forest was quiet. And the butchers – they butchered.

"For two days, the machine guns of the Nazis' death squads and, alas, also local collaborators mowed down tens of thousands of the Jews of Kyiv and the region. Whole families were erased," Herzog said.

"Let us make no mistake: Even in the present, Holocaust denial is still alive and kicking. Antisemitism still exists. Just in the past day, we all heard of another ugly manifestation of antisemitism at the Auschwitz extermination camp in the form of antisemitic graffiti that disgraces the memory of the people killed at this terrible death camp. We, world leaders, must vigorously condemn the slightest hint of this phenomenon and fight it with all our might," the Israeli president added.

Last year, a number of memorials, including synagogue prayer space, were installed as part of the construction of a massive, innovative museum complex across the whole Babi Yar area. The establishment of the center is being overseen by public figures and leaders from around the world, headed by Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

"Babi Yar is the biggest mass grave of the Holocaust ... the most quickly filled mass grave," said Sharansky.

"It's hard to breathe at this place – thousands of children took their last breath here," Zelenskyy said. "It's hard to stand here – thousands of bullets knocked people down here in Babi Yar. The earth was trembling from the convulsions of people who were still alive and trying to get out."

"For us Germans, there can only be one response: never again!" Steinmeier said.

The center also revealed the initial 159 names of hundreds of Nazi troops who took part in the massacre.

"Despite confessions, evidence and testimonies being submitted as late as the 1960s by some of the Nazi soldiers who carried out the murders, only a few of those involved ever faced justice for their heinous crimes," it said.

"They were between 20 and 60 years old," the memorial center said. "They were educated and uneducated, they included engineers and teachers, drivers and salespeople. Some were married and some were not. The vast majority of them returned to live a normal life after the war. They testified at trial and were found not guilty, except for very few commanders, not the soldiers who carried out the horrific massacre."

Father Patrick Desbois, head of the center's academic council, said some of the 159 Nazi troops named "were shooters. Others extracted the Jews from their homes. Others took their belongings and their luggage. Others armed the weapons while others were serving sandwiches, tea and vodkas to the shooters. All of them are guilty."

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The three presidents on Wednesday attended the opening of a new memorial – the "Crystal Crying Wall" created by conceptual artist Marina Abramovic. Within six months, the first museum space will be unveiled.

"We are going to give the real faces to the Holocaust, whether it's the faces of the victims, of the executors or those who were helping to save Jews," Sharansky said.

He noted that while some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi killers, at least 2,600 Ukrainian families were hiding Jews at the risk of their own lives.

"So we are going to recover the names of victims, and we are recovering more and more names of victims, the names of those who were saving Jews and the names of collaborators," he said.

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Supporters of Iran's exiled opposition rallied in Berlin Saturday to demand the prosecution of the Islamic Republic's newly elected president, Ebrahim Raisi, whom they accused of crimes against humanity.

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Flag-waving demonstrators rallied at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate as part of a "Free Iran World Summit" that featured speeches by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa. In a keynote address, Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, accused Raisi of being the "henchman" responsible for the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Raisi's election was a blow for human rights and called for an investigation of his role in what they and Washington have called the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners.

Iran has never acknowledged the mass executions, and Raisi has never publicly addressed allegations about his role.

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The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center has unveiled its plans for constructing one of the world's largest Holocaust memorial centers. The complex will be built at a 150-hectare site  at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) and is planned to include a dozen buildings to honor the memory of the 33,771 Jewish victims who were shot at the Babyn Yar ravine by the Nazis from Sept. 29-30, 1941 and the some 100,000 people the Nazis murdered there in total, including Jews, Ukrainians, Roma, and the mentally ill.

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The site will also commemorate the 1.5 million Jews murdered in similar Nazi mass shootings in the Ukraine and the rest of eastern Europe.

In September 2020, Ukrainian Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko, acting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, signed a memorandum of understanding and cooperation with BYHMC to construct a "fitting memorial" to the horrors perpetrated at Babyn Yar.

"The Babyn Yar Massacre and the Holocaust of the Jews of Ukraine are an important and tragic chapter in the history of our country. The establishment of the Babyn Yar Memorial Center, the construction of which will begin during the 80th year [after] the terrible massacre, is essential for the commemoration of the Holocaust.

"As Europe's largest mass grave, Babyn Yar represents unimaginable destruction. Thanks to these plans, it will become a place of peace, reflection and tranquility," Zelensky said.

To illustrate the need for a commemorative site of this scope, a recent survey conducted in Ukraine showed that 68% of respondents believed that the memory of 20^th-century genocides such as the Holocaust was fading. Only 16% respondents knew that over 1 million Jews had been fatally shot during the Holocaust, not far from where their own homes are now located.

The complex's buildings will include a museum dedicated to the Babyn Yar massacre; a museum to commemorate the Holocaust of Ukrainian and Eastern European Jewry as a whole; a structure bearing victims' names; a religious/spiritual center that includes a synagogue, church and mosque; an educational and scientific research center; a multi-media center; a learning and recreational space for children; and an information and conference center. The first synagogue at the site and an exhibition space are scheduled to be completed this year, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre this September.

BYHMC Artistic Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky is directing plans for the new museum complex and is consulting with international experts in museum development. The planning team also includes young Ukrainians.

In December 2020, BYHMC presented its plans to Zelensky and Tkachenko. Zelensky instructed Tkachenko to expedite construction of the synagogue and exhibition space by this September.

Former prisoner of Zion and former head of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky, who chairs the BYHMC Supervisory Board, called the museum concept "amazing."

Sharansky said that the "museum and educational center will not only both be high quality, but at the same time different from many other Holocaust centers. As such, it will help fill a vacuum in the field of Holocaust studies."

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The son of a couple killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue attack that killed 11 worshippers is suing the National Rifle Association, arguing the group's inflammatory rhetoric led to the violence.

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Marc Simon, the son of Sylvan and Bernice Simon, filed the wrongful death lawsuit Thursday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court against the NRA, the gun maker Colt's Manufacturing Co., and accused shooter, Robert Bowers, news outlets reported. Colt manufactured the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle allegedly used by Bowers.

A fourth defendant is the unknown business that sold Bowers the gun.

Bowers is charged with killing 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest attack on Jews in US history. Police said the former truck driver expressed hatred of Jews during and after the October 2018 rampage."Bowers was not born fearing and hating Jews," the suit claims. "The gun lobby taught him to do that."

Bowers has pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

The plaintiff argues gun lobbyists like the NRA radicalized people with "mendacious white supremacist conspiracy theories." The lawsuit also says Colt could have prevented the AR-15 from "bump firing," or using a modification that allows the rifle to fire more rapidly.

An NRA spokesperson declined comment on the lawsuit. The group filed for bankruptcy last week, and the claims against them in Simon's lawsuit will be stayed as a result of the group's reorganizing.

Colt did not respond to request for comment. Besides a wrongful death claim, the complaint accuses Colt of product liability and says the gun is more akin to a military-style weapon than a civilian product.

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Netanyahu spoke at the main event in memory of the Jewish residents of Hebron who were killed by Arab rioters in 1929. This year's 90th anniversary is of particular significance, as it is marked in the midst of a general election campaign.

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"Our bond to Hebron is ancient and dates to our earliest period as a nation," Netanyahu said, against the backdrop of the Cave of the Patriarchs. "The barbaric attack on the Jews here ended with a horrific result: murder, rape, slaughter, vandalizing of Torah scrolls … but we should also commend the Arabs who helped us, even though a total of 67 Jews were murdered in the riots, and the Jewish presence in Hebron was brought to an end."

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The lawmakers sent their appeal to Netanyahu ahead of his first scheduled visit to Hebron since 1998.

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The market area of Hebron is owned by Jews, but after the Jewish quarter of the city was wiped out in 1929, Arabs took it over. For the past 25 years, the area has stood empty after it was shut down following Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Nine months ago, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit decided that the land belonged to Jews. Following that decision, head of the Hebron Jewish community Avraham Ben-Yosef called to build a renewed Jewish neighborhood there. Now 17 Likud ministers and MKs are backing Ben-Yosef's initiative.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan has spent the last few days collecting signatures in favor of a Jewish neighborhood to be built in the Hebron market.

The Prime Minister's Office said the request was under review.

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The US attorney's office in Pittsburgh filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty against 46-year-old Robert Bowers in last year's attack.

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The government filing said that justification for a death sentence included allegations of substantial planning and premeditation, the vulnerability and number of victims, and motivation of religious hostility.

It also listed the injury, harm, and loss caused to the victims and the choice of the Tree of Life synagogue as the site of the attack.

The notice accused Bowers of targeting the worshippers "in order to maximize the devastation, amplify the harm of his crimes, and instill fear within the local, national and international Jewish communities."

Bowers has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. His lawyers did not return messages seeking comment. A spokeswoman for US Attorney Scott Brady declined to discuss the filing.

Prosecutors wrote that the death penalty will be justified if Bowers is convicted of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death or of using a gun to commit a crime of violence.

Bowers is accused of using an AR-15 rifle and other weapons to target worshippers in the Tree of Life synagogue during Saturday morning services in October. Seven people were also wounded, including five police officers.

Police have said that he expressed hatred of Jews during and after what was the deadliest attack on Jews in US history.

Shortly after the shootings, before Bowers was publicly identified as the suspect, US President Donald Trump said the perpetrator should "suffer the ultimate price."

"I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue," Trump told reporters in October.

"Anybody that does a thing like this to innocent people that are in temple or in church. We had so many incidents with churches. They should really suffer the ultimate price."

Two weeks ago, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to a 120-day extension in the case.

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Sunday's assault on a base in west-central Mali was the latest in a series of deadly raids by heavily armed jihadists, who have stepped up their attacks in central Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger in recent months.

The militants have tapped into festering tensions between semi-nomadic Fulani herders and farming communities across West Africa's semi-arid Sahel region to try to win support among the Fulani, who often feel politically and socially marginalized.

Suspected militiamen from the Dogon ethnic group killed about 160 Fulani in the village of Ogossagou on March 23 in Mali's worst ethnic bloodletting in living memory.

In a statement, Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the leading Islamist group in Mali, said its attack was "in commitment to its past vow to avenge and exact retribution for the martyrs from the Ogossagou massacre," according to U.S.-based SITE, which monitors jihadist websites.

Previous Islamist attacks have led to reprisals by ethnic militia against Fulani civilians, feeding a cycle of violence that regional forces, U.N. peacekeepers and thousands of French troops deployed to the zone have proved unable to break.

JNIM said it had killed at least 16 soldiers and taken two hostage, while four of its own fighters died in combat. Mali's Defense Ministry said on Saturday that 11 soldiers had been killed.

Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita appointed a new prime minister on Monday, days after the government resigned following pressure to respond to the Ogossagou massacre and other violence.

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The grave, found in the desert about 170 km (110 miles) west of the city of Samawa, contained the remains of dozens of Kurds made to "disappear" by Saddam's forces, Salih's office said.

They were among up to 180,000 people who may have been killed during Saddam's "Anfal" campaign that targeted Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s when chemical gas was used, villages were razed and thousands of Kurds were forced into camps.

"He killed them because they did not accept the continuation of this regime, because they wanted to live a free and dignified life," Salih, a Kurd, told a news conference at the grave site.

"He brought them to Samawa to bury them but our people in Samawa embraced them," Salih added. Iraq's southern provinces are predominantly inhabited by Shiite Arabs, who also suffered oppression and mass killings under Saddam, a Sunni Arab.

"The new Iraq must never forget these crimes that were committed against Iraqi people from all groups," he said.

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