Over a thousand gather at Minnetonka synagogue to mark anniversary of Oct. 7 attack on Israel
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The Twin Cities area Jewish community marked the anniversary of the attack on Israel with a somber service at a Minnetonka synagogue on Monday.
Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 hostages during its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel. In the year since, an estimated 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, where 101 Israelis remain as hostages.
At the Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, Rabbi Aaron Weininger said the deadliest day since the Holocaust changed Jewish life forever.
“We are grieving and living. Our hearts are broken and beating. My heart is here, and my heart is also in Israel,” Weininger said.
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Other speakers recounted details of the attack as told to them by friends and family in Israel.
As a teenager in the late 1970s, Cindy Amberger lived at a kibbutz near Gaza and has remained in touch with her host family ever since. Last year her host father Shlomo Mansour, 86, was among those kidnapped and is the oldest person taken hostage during the attack.
“They were woken from their sleep to sounds of sirens and rockets, and in a matter of moments, to use a phrase that’s all too familiar, their heaven became hell,” she said.
Amberger noted that as a child in 1941, Mansour moved to Israel after surviving the Farhud massacre, a pogrom in his native Iraq.
After reading a poem entitled “Never Again” along with Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker, Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman asked the congregation to stand if they had a family member or friend killed in Israel last year. About a half dozen people rose from their seats.
Dozens more stood when Spilker asked the congregation if they knew someone killed in the attack. And when Zimmerman asked if anyone was thinking of someone who died on Oct. 7, all 1,400 people gathered at Adath Jeshurun stood, and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.
