“There is nothing new under the sun.” So writes Rachel Goldberg-Polin in an essay for The Free Press today.
Rachel’s son Hersh was murdered in captivity in Gaza last year. In this piece to mark the start of Hanukkah, Rachel writes about newly public footage of her son and his fellow captives lighting a menorah in the tunnels where they were held—and murdered—by Hamas. Even in hell on earth, they kept a more-than-2,000-year-old tradition alive. They used paper cups—all they had—to celebrate a holiday which memorializes the Jewish People’s triumph over Antiochus, who during his reign in 168 BCE persecuted Jews and tried to impose pagan worship on the Temple in Jerusalem.
As Rachel puts it, they were sending a message to their captors, and now the rest of the world: “We are Jews and this is what we do on this holiday.”
Rachel’s essay was already written and edited when, this morning, we awoke to the appalling news out of Sydney. In a terror attack targeting Australian Jews, two gunmen killed at least 11 people and injured many more at an event to celebrate the start of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. (For more on this, read Brendan O’Neill’s “The Hunting of Jews at Bondi Beach.”)
There is nothing new under the sun.
—The Editors
In July this year, my husband and I were contacted by the person from the Israeli intelligence services whose job it is to tell us bad news. That is his actual job. Each of the hostage families has such a person. It is an unfortunate role to be in charge of kicking people when they are still down from the last time they were kicked down. He has a nice face and seems like a decent person.
