People may have asked you “Where were you on the day the world ended?” That’s been a topic of conversation for so many these days. But now we’re asking something else: “What were you doing the day before the world ended?”
Friday, October 6, felt like a normal end-of-summer day in Tel Aviv. Dizengoff Square was filled with people enjoying the sunshine, and coffee shops abounded. People prepared for Shabbat – particularly for the highly anticipated simultaneous Simchat Torah celebrations throughout the city. The energy was electric, and every community was celebrating in its own way.
In the heart of Tel Aviv, hundreds of olim, Israelis, and visitors congregated at Chabad on the Coast, one of many similar celebrations throughout the city. People all over the country were making the most of the festival, celebrating the Torah in the way their ancestors in ancient Israel could only have dreamed would come again.
Earlier in the day, prior to all the celebrations of Simchat Torah, life continued on as normal for many. People gathered with loved ones to celebrate occasions, went to pick up their favorite lunches, went to work – or mourned those who had passed on. Everyone’s day looked different.
The following vignettes are among many that were compiled from civilians, soldiers, religious community leaders, and reporters working on The Jerusalem Post’s Breaking News desk that day, when no one could have predicted the chaos in those hours beforehand.
October 6 and 7 in massive contrast
The night before Hamas launched the deadliest attack against Israel on a single day to date, a Brazilian-Israeli celebrated her friend’s milestone of living in Israel for two years. Joana Raskin, who operates Perro Libré, a dog walking and boarding service in Tel Aviv, celebrated a friend’s journey to life in the Jewish state.
Raskin, who had arrived for a MASA internship at an animal sanctuary, understood the significance of such a milestone. October 6 was a day for her to celebrate with her friends; but what would have been more engagement with her favorite place became a period of mourning.
“I didn’t leave my house for the next two weeks,” Raskin recalled.
A. Tsetlin, who lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and infant daughter, was in the United States on October 6 visiting his family, particularly his terminally ill brother. “We were scheduled to return to Israel on October 27,” Tsetlin said. Due to the time difference, the war started for him “on October 6, 2023, at 11:30 p.m. – 50 years to the day of the Yom Kippur War. By 1:30 a.m., I was called in on a Tzav 8,” the emergency military call-up for reservists.
“By 6 a.m. Saturday, I had secured a seat later that afternoon on an American Airlines flight, which was canceled at 1 p.m. I managed to get one of the last seats on the first El Al flight leaving Saturday evening from JFK, arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport at 5 p.m. on Sunday,” he said. “I went straight home, got there at 6:45, changed into my uniform, and was on my way south at 7:15. I arrived at my unit at 10 p.m.”
Tsetlin said that he would not see his family again until his brother’s passing, 11 weeks later, on December 23, when he traveled back to New York for the week-long shiva mourning period. He returned to Israel, and his family returned on February 14.
For Lillian Odze, it was a simple twist of fate that she was in Israel on October 6 and 7, as she lives in London and only visits when she can. On October 6, she was happy to be celebrating Sukkot and Simchat Torah in Israel again after not being able to for years due to the coronavirus pandemic. Her 18-year tradition had finally come back to life, and October 6 was just another crazy Jerusalem day, at the same hotel she was used to, comfortable at, and felt safe in.
“I was having breakfast in the sukkah of the hotel, and you couldn’t hear yourself think from all the cars and impatient drivers honking their horns,” Odze said of October 6. “People were everywhere. It was just how I like it and what I expected. That night, as usual, we walked to the Tzemah Zedek shul [synagogue] in the Old City. It was an amazing experience – we saw old friends and met new ones. There was so much food, so much happiness.”
But early the next morning, the sound of sirens was the last thing Odze expected. She noted that the hotel had people who were not religiously affiliated or as observant as she was, who had their phones on. But there really wasn’t much information available to the public at that point.
After the morning sirens, “the streets that were usually full of people going to different shuls were empty,” she said. “There was a feeling in the air that things were not good. My husband insisted on going to Tzemah Zedek, which he did despite my objections.”
The mood was the same as the day went on, she said. “The streets were empty; hardly anyone dared to go out. I felt unsafe walking to my mother’s house. It was frightening.”
She said that she was so used to seeing the Jerusalem light rail platform full immediately after a holiday or Shabbat ended, but this night was different. “There were maybe three people. There was no dancing in the street, parties were canceled, and big streets like Ben-Yehuda had been closed off.”
Odze said the world felt forever changed. “It turned on its head in a split second. With that, I lost my sense of security and safety. I wasn’t sure anymore if I was safe in the hotel until I was able to fly back home.”
CHAYA LEVIN was living in Ashkelon on October 6, but even six months later, she and her husband have still not returned to their home. That day, she was at home with him after a long week of work and traveling around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for Hol Hamoed –the intermediate days of the holiday.
The 26-year-old said that they were getting ready for a quiet Shabbat – that would turn into anything but. “We were planning to go to the shul nearby for Simchat Torah,” she said.
“I ended up waking up at 6 a.m. to a siren, which I nearly slept through. I thought it was odd: no warning or anything. The sirens didn’t stop. Finally after a short break, I looked outside and saw the building where we had just spent the first day of [the holiday] up in smoke – that’s when we knew this was something different.”
Levin, who made aliyah in March 2023 from the United States, quickly understood that the events of the day would only get darker. “We, in general, just have an understanding of when things get worse,” she said.
“When we see in the news words like ‘escalating tensions,’ it typically means we’re about to experience some rockets,” the Ashkelon resident said. Levin’s husband is a native of the city, who brought the couple to settle there. “This time, though, almost everyone was caught completely by surprise. I wasn’t even certain it was a siren at first. There were booms even before the siren happened. Everything was different.”
Gila Atwood was at her home in south Jerusalem on October 6. “Our youngest son had just come home from Malta on a short holiday break with two of his sisters,” she recalled. Somehow, their mother had managed to sleep through every alarm that sounded on the morning of Oct. 7. Her family was expecting her to come outside at any moment, as the center of Israel had received countless rockets that morning. “When I sleep, I sleep deep!” she explained.
“I finally got up an hour or so before lunchtime, and my menfolk caught me up with the news. I remember turning to my son Avi and telling him he might be called up for reserve duty. He didn’t think so, but he received a message from the IDF early that day telling him to be on standby,” Atwood said.
Her other son, M, had been hearing of clips from Hamas from his friends. He had just been invited to attend the Supernova music festival with his friends but had decided for whatever reason to not attend. The family was in disbelief.
“Over the following hours, his emotional distress became very great – he had been invited by friends to go down to that concert!” his mother exclaimed. “Other things were happening in his life, so he gave it a pass this time – that saved him. But it didn’t save some of his acquaintances. A number were killed, and others were taken on that terrible day – people he used to hang out with.”
The family spent the coming days shocked by the loss that almost was, and helped their son manage his grief. However, M managed to find solace by seeking out the families of those who did lose someone and sitting with them.
“When I got up the following morning, the 8th, feeling emotionally ragged and fragile from the day and night before, Avi had already left,” Atwood said. “He has been serving since then.”
For breaking news reporters, the days live in infamy
Tzvi Joffre, a long-time member of the Jerusalem Post breaking news team, described a massive miscalculation. “On October 6, I was getting ready for what I thought was going to be a regular Simchat Torah. That morning, I was, oddly enough, keeping an eye on the situation in Gaza, since riots were planned for that day. But weirdly, at the last moment the organizers announced that Hamas police had prevented them from nearing the border,” he recalled.
“While it was weird that they’d suddenly switched directions after weeks of escalating, I thought at the time that maybe it was a sign that Hamas wasn’t interested in a war in Gaza in the end. That thought didn’t age well.”
The next morning, Joffre woke up to the sounds of explosions in the distance – and the red alert application on his phone was going off. Working as a dorm counselor at a yeshiva in Modi’in, he quickly needed to alert others.
“I started running between the apartments to wake people up and get the steel window shades of the bunkers closed. On my way, a friend of mine who was called up [for the army] stopped on the way to let me know that beyond the insane rocket fire, there were also Hamas terrorists in Israel, and no one was sure about how far they’d gotten. That’s when I made the decision to use my phone on Shabbat for the first time in my life,” Joffre said.
“I began running with the other counselors in the yeshiva to gather all the guys and to make a plan of how to keep everyone safe without causing any panic or excess anxiety, while also continuing the Simchat Torah prayers in some format.
“Thankfully, Modi’in only had one siren that day, but since the situation remained unclear, we set up a buddy system so that people wouldn’t be out alone.”
Immediately afterward, Joffre began his work again on the breaking news desk, supporting his team and covering some of the biggest stories of the war’s earliest days.
Sam Halpern, a manager of the breaking news team, was working an overnight shift on October 6. The shift began at 10:45 p.m., and he had spent the day resting before beginning to work. He was one of two people covering the shift, and it was relatively quiet throughout the night.
The shift would change over at 6:45 a.m., and a Shabbat Saturday morning on the breaking news desk was often even quieter. Shabbat evening was in full swing, and the overnight team was ahead of schedule with their typical task list. But by 6:20 a.m., after a night of relative quiet, there were sirens.
“Yuval, my shift partner, sent a now-infamous message that the sirens were probably nothing,” Halpern said. “But we quickly realized that wasn’t the case; the rocket alarms were going off at such a fast pace.”
Halpern had never experienced alarms for rocket fire before the morning of Oct. 7, and he knew immediately that the consistency and general speed of rockets heading to different parts of the country was far from normal. “Soon the shift would change to morning staff, and [a manager] hopped on at the start, along with the staff for that morning.”
All he could do immediately after the shift ended was try to get some rest, but that process would be disrupted by the graphic content – bloodied bodies in the middle of streets, videos from Hamas of ransacked army bases, and the fatalities that accompanied those attacks, and other atrocities that the horrific day would soon unveil.
Halpern managed to fall asleep for a short period before waking up to a series of missed calls from family and friends who had wanted to inform him that things were much worse than he could have expected when he fell asleep. Later on Oct. 7, Halpern would work an overnight shift again, with this article’s author, another breaking news editor.
Gadi Zaig, a Jerusalem Post breaking news editor, recounted an uneventful October 6, wishing that he had tried to change his schedule. He was part of the shift change on the morning of Oct. 7. “I had the displeasure of working on shift [that morning]. Apart from a few rockets that fired during the previous shift, I covered the first hours of the war, while the massacre was happening,” he said.
“I couldn’t believe what I was writing. The Hamas invasion. The number of dead, – 600, 700 – they just kept increasing. The number of rockets being fired on us. There was so much information coming in from Israeli sources that for the first time since working for the newspaper, I wasn’t able to keep up with all the reports coming in. What was supposed to be an eight-hour shift became a 14-hour shift that Saturday,” Zaig said.
After moving from New Jersey to Israel as a teenager with his family, and after having worked at the Post for a few years already, he knew that this was beyond special circumstances.
“What I never expected was that while we were grieving, reports and posts on social media came in celebrating the attack – this was on Oct. 7 before the Israeli response,” he said. “I remember reading that the attack marked the darkest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and the fact that such an attack was celebrated infuriated me to an extent that I didn’t think was possible.”
Zaig also noted the change that he experienced after the attacks and how he absorbed social media. “After that day, going on social media is just too painful now. It used to be filled with pop culture and memes; now it’s filled with geopolitics and antisemitism.”Positive memories from October 6 could be buried. Don’t let them be.
Though the day before the massacre appears like a hazy memory, the events of Oct. 7 can very easily overshadow positive memories from just prior. The people of Israel know that memory is worth preserving however possible. The day before could very well be a memory worth preserving.