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going to be in Israel for a few weeks, if anyone knows where to find ways to volunteer short-term pls dm!

אני הולך לישראל, איפה אפשר להתנדב?

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going to be in Israel for a few weeks, if anyone knows where to find ways to volunteer short-term pls dm!

אני הולך לישראל, איפה אפשר להתנדב?

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the “good jew” test is not meant to be passed. it’s meant to give gentiles plausible deniability.

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a few accounts I follow have shared this tweet from Holocaust survivor Lucy Lipiner today, and I wanted to post it directly from her account…I wasn’t expecting the date to be two years ago.

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Hi Avi. I hope you're ok. I've known you from the Hannibal fandom and remember when you made this account to advocate for your people. Just wanted to wish you patience and good health in these hard times. Your Hannibal posting is greatly missed ❤

I can’t tell you how much this means anon, thank you ❤️❤️❤️. I’m doing ok, I’ve been a lot less active here since I’m on a month-long geopolitics program and the hours are intense. But I’ll be popping up here and there still!

As for Hannibal, I know someday I’ll put my head back, close my eyes, and type away into the quiet of the stream. It might be a while, but it’s always in the back of my mind.

My DMs are open if you ever want to chat (or see any of my unpublished memes/fics :P)

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my queerness is not for you to dismiss. my pride is not for you to weaponize. my identity is not for you to call an excuse for genocide.

I am here. I exist. I am proud of who I am and I live happily as myself. I am not secretly oppressed, the laws my community has worked so hard to achieve are not a distraction, I'm not some sort of IDF shill pretending there are queer people exist here when we're secretly all cishet.

I have never felt othered for my identity as queer like I felt othered by the global queer community for my identity as an Israeli.

I am not a distraction from genocide. I am not am excuse for islamophobia. I am a queer Israeli. leave us alone, we're not tools for your propaganda.

Am Yisrael Fucking Chai. 🇮🇱🏳️‍🌈

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The other day, I went with my rl bff to the Jerusalem branch of the Museum of Tolerance for an exhibition on the Hamas massacre.

This is the sight that greeted us. "Esthers of the world, rise up!"

It's a poster celebrating two women whose families had lived in Iran, one is Jewish, the other is Muslim, and both women ended up being murdered due to the Islamic regime of that country, even though the Jewish woman's family had escaped Iran and fled to Israel after the Islamic revolution. The face of each girl is actually a composite, made from many smaller pictures of her people who have lost their lives because of the Islamist regime of Iran.

I knew this right away, because I have shared a piece that was done about the poster and how it came to be almost 2 months ago. 

"You don't understand!" my bff (who works as a teacher) said, all emotional, "She," my friend points to the Jewish girl on the left side of the poster, Shirel Haim Pour, "is the cousin of one of my students."

There is zero distance in Israel between us and the Oct 7 atrocities. 

We go in and join the tour of the exhibition. The guide tells us it was built jointly with Malki Shem Tov, who is a well known name in Israel, if you work at a museum. Malki founded a "creative visual solutions" company with his brother Assaf, through which among other things, they helped build many Israeli exhibitions over the years. "His son..." the tour guide starts to say and I don't need more than that for something to click in my head. I know so many of the names, faces and stories of the hostages, and so Omer Shem Tov pops right away into my mind. I didn't make the connection before, but now I can only imagine what it meant for this father to work on an exhibition that recounts, among other stories, how his son was victimized and robbed of his freedom during this massacre.

There is zero distance in Israel between us and the Oct 7 atrocities. 

The opening wall has a huge time stamp, 6:29 in the morning. 

The tour guide doesn't have to explain this number to Israelis, or why it's designed to look like an alarm clock display. We were all woken up on that fateful Saturday morning by the alarm clock of Hamas' rockets. And it doesn't matter what we thought or believed the day before, as the full scale and horror of the attack were starting to become known along Oct 7, we were all woken up.

There is zero distance in Israel between us and those atrocities. I know this, and still it strikes me, again and again.

There's an area dedicated to the pictures of one photographer who went to the south soon after the massacre. I knew some of them already, like the pic showing the bodies of 13 elderly Israelis, who were on their way to a tour of the Israeli south on that Saturday.

Some are new, like the pic of the door handle in one bomb shelter. I stop for a second, because now that I've moved into my new place, it hits me that the bomb shelter door was made by the same company. Suddenly, I feel like I'm inside the picture in a reality where the terrorists took a slightly different route on Oct 7. The door was photographed from inside the bomb shelter, and the bullets that pierced it, they had to have hit the personal holding it shut. The handle has blood stains on it, and it's broken off. I can only imagine how many hours this person held, and how much force they had to use, for that to happen. I know one thing, even without knowing exactly who this bomb shelter belonged to... If this person was on their own, they would have probably ended up surrendering rather than keep fighting to hold on to the handle this desperately. This was likely someone trying to keep their family safe. 

One note retrieved from the body of a terrorist is on display. It says everything about the motivation of the monsters who committed these atrocities, and every word is purely motivated by antisemitism and religious zeal. The note is actually not in Arabic, as it may first appear, it's in Farsi, the language spoken in Iran, hinting at the source, the Islamist regime there, which doesn't care about the liberation of anyone, it aspires to create a global network of fanatic terrorism.

The translation: "You must sharpen the blades of your swords and be pure in your intentions before Allah. Know that the enemy is a disease that has no cure, except beheading and uprooting the hearts and livers. Attack them!"

There is a section dedicated to women's stories. The exhibition visitors spread out to watch the testimonies, each on a separate screen. It's a not like a forest, you can't really see it for the trees, and it's another moment of feeling overwhelmed because we can't truly get it. It's just not comprehensible, facing so many stories about intentional, face to face cruelty, brutality, sadism and joy in it. Mali Shoshana tells the story of how she tried to play dead while lying shot in a pool of her own blood, but her body wouldn't stop shaking, so she somehow turned on her side to the wall and knocked her injured knee against it, causing herself to pass out from the pain. It saved her life. Ricarda Louk tells the story of the last message they got from her daughter Shani, trusting she was right and there was nothing for them to worry about. Then Ricarda's son started screaming and crying, because he saw the same vid many of came across on that day, of his sister being dragged into Gaza stripped down, mutilated, abused, molested and humiliated, while Gazan civilians were celebrating the public degradation of her body. And there's more and more and more. "You can come back and continue to listen," the guide promises as he moves us to the next segment, but the truth is no matter how many stories I've listened to and absorbed, it still doesn't feel like enough.

There is a wall with the head shots of the victims in Israel who lost their lives due to this war, whether they were murdered on Oct 7 or since, but it's only been updated up until Mar 27 of this year. Even so, no matter what angle I tried, I couldn't fit in all of the pictures.

Interactive screens allow a geographic telling of the massacre's story. They show maps of Israel's south, with dots on them, red for the murdered, dark blue for hostages, bright blue for hostages who have been returned, grey for the injured. You can tap a dot and read a story. Or you can zoom out and try to comprehend how is it possible for there to be that many dots on the maps.

"From darkness to light," reads the exhibition title. That's the perception of time in Judaism. We always move from darkness to light. And there's a section for the light, for stories of resilience, of bravery, of rehabilitation, of mutual support and caring. Filmed interviews that do their best to summarize an incomprehensible amount of good we've seen in response to an incomprehensible amount of evil. It features people from every demographic in Israel, and in that way also serves as a reminder of just how diverse we are as a society.

This part, I think to myself, was included for visitors from abroad. We Israelis, we know.

There's one story I know already. Tomer Greenberg, an Israeli officer, rescued on Oct 7 baby twins from the carnage. He was later killed fighting in Gaza. Like a puzzle, I've heard this story from several angles, including from Tomer before he died. This movie features an interview I hadn't heard yet, with the volunteer paramedic that Tomer handed the twins to. Shalom, this medic, talks about how they clung to him desperately as they got to be fed and feel safe and cared for again for the first time in what's estimated to have been 14 hours. I'm sitting there, thinking of those babies crying, not understanding why their parents aren't coming to feed them, and I don't know how to deal with this.

Shalom shares that the experiences of Oct 7 have inspired him to try and become a combative soldier, something that wasn't on the cards for him before that. I wonder again at people who can act like subjecting an entire (already traumatized) society to a sadistic massacre can liberate anyone.

And I understand Shalom fully. When your family is in the pits of hell, there's nowhere you want to be other than there, with them, doing what you can, rather than sit and watch helpless from afar. Most people would say he did a lot on that day. Shalom must have felt like that still wasn't enough.

At the very end, visitors are invited to add their own little piece of light, through neon notes and pens on which they'd share their thoughts. Nothing feels like it can sum everything I'm thinking and feeling up, but not writing anything feels worse, so my bff and I add a few of our words to the notes.

I don't have any profound conclusions for this post anymore than I did for my note. I just know that this still hurts, that we're still losing people daily, that we can't begin to heal, because we're still in the middle of the wound being inflicted. But I also know that we WILL heal, that even if the wound can't be closed yet, our collective immune system kicked into action on Oct 7 already, that we will continue to share the pain and the comfort and the care, and this massacre and war will probably never stop hurting, that we'll never be the same, but eventually we will be alright. Where people choose to care, there's just no other option.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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cant stop crying

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-rescues-4-hostages-alive-in-stunning-operation-in-central-gaza/

4 hostages have been rescued!! Baruch Hashem

Nonnie, I was just trying to screen shot the news, but my computer is not cooperating... So thank you for the link and indeed, Baruch Hashem for this grace, and for our amazing security forces who risked themselves to carry this operation out.

I'm so happy for all of the hostages, I'm so happy for all of Am Yisrael, but I'm actually particularly happy for Liora, Noa's mom, who has terminal cancer, and all she asked for was to get to see her daughter free before she dies. I'm crying, I'm so glad she got this dying wish fulfilled, and I'm praying for all the hostages for a healing and successful recovery.

Am Yisrael chai! 💖

[Edited to add:]

Managed to get the computer to work! I wanted the screenshot directly from the IDF's twitter, 'coz I felt they deserve all the credit, along with ISA and Israeli police.

And here's Nonnie's link, made clickable.

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hey don’t cry. two nice jewish boys falling in love while studying talmud and homoerotically wrapping each other’s tefillin ok?

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happy pride to all the jews that don’t feel safe going to their local pride events and maybe never have. happy pride to the jews that struggle to find a place in the queer community. happy pride to jews who still show up for their communities despite hatred and ignorance thrown at them. happy pride to all the jews who had a falling out with and/or don’t talk to their parents/family bc of being queer. happy pride to the trans and nonbinary jews dealing with religious bigotry in and out of the jewish community. happy pride to all jews everywhere no matter your sexual or gender identities, denominations, and opinions. you are loved and you are valued and you deserve to be here.

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David Gerbi gestures in front of the main synagogue in Tripoli, Libya, October 2011. David Gerbi, a 56-year-old psychoanalyst living in Italy, was referred to by many as the “revolutionary Jew.” He returned to his homeland of Libya after a 44-year exile recently, and wanted to restore Tripoli’s long-abandoned main synagogue. (Credit: AP Photo)

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I wear the Magen David for many reasons, but do you know what my proudest reason is? The reason I display it proudly for all to see rather than hide it when antisemitism is skyrocketing across the globe? I wear it because it makes other Jews feel safe. I work in a very popular tourist location, and thus I see people from all over the country (USA) and the world. I wear my Magen David proudly for that older Jewish woman who feels insecure next to my goyish coworkers, so that when she sees me she smiles and shows me her necklace too and says how nice it is to find another member of the tribe way out here. I wear it so that the Jewish couple from out of town can see it and find another Jew in the crowd, someone they know they can trust, someone they can wish a "Good Shabbos" to. I wear it so that the Jewish woman my age can see it and then excitedly show me her Judaica tattoos, thrilled to find another Jew her age who isn't afraid to be openly Jewish.

I am not a Jew with trembling knees. And I want every member of my community to see me and know that they are safe with me, that here is a proud Jew to whom they can go. That is why I wear the Magen David, above all other reasons, so that my fellow Jews feel safe.

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Israel journalist Eric Weiss received a suspicious call made by an Iranian, and lemme say this is exactly how yall should handle death threats on here as well vshfnjfjsjs

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REBLOG IF YOU THINK PATRILINEAL JEWS ARE VALID AND AN IMPORTANT PART OF AM YISRAEL✡️