* Translation by Yehoshua Siskin ([email protected])
“Shalom Sivan from New York. The big story is not the huge historical gathering that took place yesterday in Washington. The story is about today, the morning after.
300,000 Jews return today to their campus, their office, or their home. But they are not the same Jews they were the day before.
There were kids who got a day off from school and arrived by bus. Retirees who came from Miami or from Canada by plane or traveled for hours by car. And mostly there were young people who will now return to college to find horrible pro Hamas demonstrations, but they will return with heads held high, determined and proud.
To our dismay, it took the barbaric violence of Hamas and the wave of anti-Semitism in America, especially in academia, to cause people to finally wake up.
But why speak about 300,000? I would like to focus on just one person who brought tears to my eyes. I have a cousin who has no connection with the rest of our family. He never visited Israel. He never agreed to send his kids to a Jewish summer camp. He has no connection to any Jewish community.
But then yesterday I suddenly saw him. At first I thought this must be someone who only looked like him, but no. This same cousin traveled 10 hours from Boston to march for Israel — for the first time in his life.
On October 7th, a great number of our people tragically died, but something in us has been revived.”
