After October 7, 'Never Again' isn't enough - opinion

For most of my life, I believed in two words. Like so many of my generation, I grew up on Never Again: a vow built from the ashes of the Holocaust, repeated at every memorial and every Holocaust Remembrance Day. I thought it was a guarantee.

On October 7, 2023, that guarantee broke. Some 1,200 people were murdered in a single morning, and 251 were taken hostage. It was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. We learned, at a price no one should ever have to pay, that Never Again is a hope. Saying it cannot make it true.

So as we approach the third anniversary, I want to suggest that we say something different. We are not in a position to promise the world what will never happen to us. But we can promise one another what we will do. We will never forget. And no one will be left alone.

'Never Forget' becomes 'Never Alone'

We already know what “alone” costs. Many Holocaust survivors lost entire families and then found no one to help them carry it. There were no support groups and no language for trauma, so they rebuilt their lives and said nothing. Many spoke about whom they had lost only near the end of their lives, and their children grew up in that silence. We can make sure that never again is a bereaved family left to grieve alone.

I say this as someone who has spent 25 years in the company of grief. In August 2001, our daughter Michal was 12 and preparing for her bat mitzvah in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber struck the Sbarro restaurant, killing 15 people.

Michal canceled her celebration and gave the money to the victims’ families. As we got to know those families, we saw their needs went far beyond the first weeks. No one, anywhere in the world, was providing long-term care for victims of terror. That gap became OneFamily.

Here is the most important thing those 25 years have taught me: grief does not get smaller on a schedule. The world imagines that healing moves in a straight line, with each year a little lighter than the last. In fact, trauma comes in waves.

The third year is often among the hardest. The funerals are over, and the meals have stopped arriving. The people who called every week now call on the anniversary, if they call at all. This is when a widow finally faces the paperwork she could not bear to open. It is when a teenager who held himself together for his mother starts to come apart.

Since October 7, more than 1,600 families have joined OneFamily’s circle of bereaved families, along with 316 new widows and widowers and 37 twins who lost their twin brother or twin sister.

In three years, we have taken under our care more bereaved families than we did in the 22years before. We are caring for and supporting more than 5,300 children, teens, and young adults, and more than 3,200 bereaved parents. To meet that need, our annual budget has grown nearly fivefold since 2022.

BEHIND EACH number is a home that has stopped working. A mother who no longer cooks, because setting the table means facing the empty chair. A father who can’t focus at work.  Parents so consumed by the son they lost that the children still at home begin to feel invisible. Capable adults who can no longer get through the day.

Bereavement is not only sorrow. It is the slow collapse of ordinary life, and it rarely shows from the outside.

That is why I believe our collective responsibility has grown since October 7, not shrunk. This is not only Israel’s burden. It belongs to the whole Jewish people, in Jerusalem and Johannesburg, in Toronto and Tel Aviv, in New York and Netivot. Recovering from October 7 will take generations of work as a community and as worldwide Jewry: to learn, to remember, to see the pain of others, to lean in and care, and to heal.

The greatest danger now is not that we will forget October 7. It is that we will get used to it.

After three years of sirens, headlines, and funerals, even the kindest heart builds calluses. The days of remembrance ahead are our chance to peel them back and feel again. Learn one name and its story. Call the family you have been meaning to call. Support the unglamorous, long-term work of the therapists and volunteers who stay after the cameras leave.

We have learned what helps. OneFamily’s approach is built on principles drawn from Option B, the book Sheryl Sandberg wrote with psychologist Adam Grant after the sudden death of her husband. They are all important, but three of them matter most: First, people need to know they are not alone. Second, the most helpful support comes from those who have suffered a similar loss. Third, meeting someone farther along the same road gives hope that today’s acute grief will not last forever.

So we bring widows together with widows, parents with parents, orphans with orphans. In a room with people who truly understand each other, the bereaved find words for what they could not say anywhere else.

I have seen what this looks like when it works. Widows who came to us after the Second Intifada now sit with young women widowed in 2024 and say, simply, I know. I’m here. Children who grew up in our programs now mentor children who lost a parent in Gaza or on the Lebanese border. What began as care received has become care given, full circle, again and again. That is the answer I can offer to the broken promise of Never Again: Never alone.

We will come through this stronger. I believe that completely. But strength does not mean the pain is gone. It means we carry it together. We can emerge grieving but strong, missing the people we love but full of love. That is not a slogan. It is work, and it belongs to all of us.

The writer is the chairman and co-founder of OneFamily, Israel’s national organization supporting victims of terror and war and their families. His wife, Chantal Belzberg, received the 2026 Israel Prize in recognition of their 25 years of work healing the nation.