‘We will rebuild as a nation and a people’

It’s been three days since I received the call. “Adira, it’s bad news. Just pray. Our cousin Adi Kaploun has been kidnapped from her kibbutz by Hamas terrorists.”

I immediately whispered to myself, “Breathe Adira, just breathe. Have faith and hope”. The shock. The pain. The unknown. So many unanswered questions. One part of me needed to know more. What unfolded? Tell me? Tell me? But do I really want to know the horror that unfolded? This is the stuff of which nightmares are made.

I was told their two children Negev and Eshel had been saved by a heroic neighbour and are now reunited with their father. The four-year-old is in hospital recovering from a gunshot/shrapnel wound. The four-month-old is being treated for a breathing issue because of what he inhaled during the massacre.

The terrorists call themselves “freedom fighters”, but let’s call them for what they really are. They are masked barbarians and savages. What kind of person takes women, children and the elderly from their beds and rounds them like cattle? Like the rest of the world, am I horrified? Yes. Am I petrified for what is to come? Yes. But sadly, I am not surprised.

Antisemitism is not new to us Jews. As a people we have been persecuted, we have been vilified, murdered, evicted and thrown out of most countries despite our immense contribution to their society. We have been rendered helpless and homeless but never hopeless! We have endured slavery, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust and in more recent times, lived through the wars to establish and secure the state of Israel and we have survived. Broken and battered but as a people, we have endured.

So many thoughts are going through my mind. Every year, at our Passover Seder we sing or recite the timeless liturgy of the Haggadah: “B’chol dor va’dor… In every generation they rise up to destroy us… and God saves us.” Miraculously, we are still around to say that.

Time seems to stop as I am glued to the media 24/7 flipping between stations hoping for something actually “new” on the news. The experience is surreal. I am watching a war on prime time from the comfort of my living room, simultaneously checking my phone hoping for faster updates, yet, like everyone else, I don’t actually know much at the moment.

This experience reiterates for me that as part of the Jewish nation we have learned that we can rely only on each other. We need to be strong and proud. We have unfortunately seen that the support of world governments for us can sway like the wind.

Our true allies are really the millions of Jews around the globe who stand united with Israel. We are a people with a strong moral compass whose belief system is robust. Faith and hope! Faith and hope!

I know that the mourning and the trauma will continue for decades. Like my parents and grandparents and generations before me, a trip to Europe and Israel is incomplete without a visit to lay a stone and pray at the grave of relatives who were murdered just for being Jewish or for fighting for the survival of the state of Israel.

What I do know is that long after the bloodshed, the tears and the unimaginable pain and suffering, we will do what we did for generations. We will rise up. We will rebuild as a nation and as a people and be stronger than ever.

Am Yisrael Chai is not just a chant. It’s our mantra. It is in our DNA. So today, through my tears and pain watching the suffering of my family and my fellow Jews in Israel I will gather my children and grandchildren together to pray for Adi’s return, for the safety of our soldiers and the security of the state of Israel… with faith and hope.

Adira Werdiger of Melbourne is a cousin of Australian-born Israeli Yonadav Kaploun, whose daughter-in-law Adi Kaploun was murdered in the Hamas attacks.

Sadly, it was confirmed after this op-ed was written that Adi Kaploun had been killed.