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A full month has passed since the horrible attacks by Hamas against Israel, which led us into this war. I know in America, Halloween has passed, and everyone is now gearing up for Thanksgiving, and the Holiday season. It’s kind of like an alternate reality over here, like we living are on two different planets. We are still reeling from the shock and aftereffects of last month, in mourning, as well as being in a full-blown war.

Last Wednesday, my wife Anita and I joined 100+ volunteers to pack cartons of food for Israeli soldiers. We were picked up by bus at about 7:30 a.m. in Rehovot, a city between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and transported to an Army facility. At the base, we were joined by like-minded individuals from Modi’in and Ra’anana, two cities in central Israel. Everyone was eager to contribute, and the common language was English even though the supervising staff were young Israelis. Most volunteers were in their 70s with the oldest being 94 - a “young at heart” new immigrant from South Africa.

As this article is being written, in Eretz Yisrael it is already Monday afternoon. We already had two full days of work and all the kids went to school and came home - twice! It is now 1:30 p.m. and we need to thank Hashem that the kids all arrived home safely. They are expecting a fresh, hot fleishig lunch, because Israelis eat their main meal in the middle of the day.

The Simchas Torah massacre in Israel has changed our world irrevocably. The tragedy has the power to categorize all events going forward as either pre-October 7 or post-October 7.

In the hours after the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival in Kibbutz Re’im, West Hempstead resident Moshe Nisenboym learned that his niece Zhenya Nisenboym, 32, and nephew Ilan Moshe Akov, 29, had disappeared after thousands of Hamas terrorists blew in a gap in the border fence separating the Gaza Strip from southern Israel. As concertgoers ran for their lives, hundreds of them were gunned down or kidnapped.

When David Kirschbaum, 23, was four months old, his mother took the newborn sabra back to Queens, where she raised him with the help of his grandparents. But his birthplace never left him. “He watched the Second Lebanon War on television with his grandmother at age six,” she said. He initially attended the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, and at home he kept kosher in a “Conservadox” approach to Jewish life.