By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
“A year ago, the Jewish world changed profoundly.”
Congregation Neveh Shalom Senior Rabbi David Kosak started his remarks at Sunday’s “A Night To Remember” memorial service with that simple sentence. That profound change, sparked by Hamas’ brutal assault on Southern Israel, has touched every corner of – and every person in – the Jewish world. 
Twelve hundred dead on Oct. 7. One hundred and one still in captivity in Gaza a year later. Tens of thousands evacuated from both ends of Israel as one front of a war enters its second year and another one begins to open. Waves of antisemitism and hatred, on a scale not yet seen this century, rolling over Jewish communities like the stones on the shore. 
In the face of these tragedies, the 1,500 in attendance, both in person – filling Neveh Shalom’s main sanctuary to the back wall – and online, had one job Sunday night. 
“Our sacred calling tonight is to mourn,” Rabbi Kosak said, “to reflect on the lives that were taken too soon and the pain that we as a community share together.”
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“Oct. 7 has left its mark in our hearts and our memories,” Jewish Federation of Greater Portland President and CEO Marc Blattner said. “We remember where we were, what we were doing, and the sinking sense of horror and loss on what should have been a day of celebration during Simchat Torah.”
The Federation co-sponsored the event alongside the overwhelming majority of Jewish organizations in the Portland area. Blattner laid out the accounting of the year’s tragedies. 
“We also recognize that this war has unleashed many tragedies over the past year,” he explained. “Rising waves of antisemitism, hundreds of Israeli soldiers who’ve fallen in battle, widespread bombings and evacuations in Israel’s north, and the unfortunate consequences of any war on terror: the loss of innocent lives in Gaza and now Lebanon.”
Blattner then introduced Micha Biton – an Israeli singer-songwriter who, one year ago, spent 14 hours huddled in a safe room with his family on a kibbutz near Gaza. 
“I have learned to tell my story from a place of light and faith,” Biton said. 
For much of the next hour, he held the synagogue-sized crowd transfixed in his accounting of the day, interspersed with song. 
“Libby, my daughter, received a message from her friend that her father and his brother were killed when they went out to fight with the terrorists and we felt like it was the end of the world,” he said. “They were my two best friends.”
A total of 20 people from the kibbutz were murdered by Hamas that day. 
“There is nothing more heartbreaking than burying your friends, parents, children and grandparents,” Biton said. “The tears from crying were used up, and the grief was too much to bear.”
The funerals began – daily. On Oct. 19, Biton buried his best friend and then went to stand with his son as he celebrated his bar mitzvah. Biton had thought to postpone, but a friend told him to do no such thing. Biton remembered looking up at the crowd that had joined the celebration as he placed his hands on his son’s head in a traditional blessing. 
“I felt the tears were mixed between joy and sadness,” he said. “I looked around and I saw how the people of Israel, in all their glory, lifted us up from the darkest place, gave us support, hugged us and surround us with love. They told us that ‘you are not alone. We are with you.’”
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Rabbi Michael Cahana, Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Portland, recalled his own “one year ago.” About 36 hours after Biton and his family emerged from their safe room, Rabbi Cahana stood in the same spot he occupied Sunday night, on the bima of a synagogue not his own, speaking to a crowd trying to process a horror. 
“We didn’t know even how to find words for the experience that we have just seen,” he said of a year ago. “We didn’t know how we would move forward, and it has been perhaps the most difficult year in my Jewish life, my rabbinic life, certainly the most difficult year in modern Jewish history.”
Rabbi Cahana prayed for peace for the dead and for the hostages, present and former. He prayed for the soldiers of Israel, and for the leaders of the world. He saved a last prayer for the assembled crowd. 
“Bless us all with hope for the day when peace, at long last, comes for the people of Israel, for all the inhabitants of the land, for our neighbors, for all of the Middle East and throughout the four corners of the earth,” he said.
Prior to the recitation of El Malei Rachamim, the traditional prayer for the souls of the dead, Rabbi Jonathan Seidel added on to the divine plea for peace, addressing the prayer’s recipient by the prayer’s own name - El Malei Rachamim means “G-d, full of mercy.”
“El Malei Rachamim, bring this conflict to an end soon,” Rabbi Seidel prayed. “El Malei Rachamim, help us to metabolize and transform hatred on this planet and its violent outposts. El Malei Rachamim, help us come together as a Jewish community in times of joy and simcha again.”
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Before leading the recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, Neveh Shalom’s Associate Rabbi Eve Posen mentioned another traditional grief ritual.
“When one of our close relatives dies, we take a black ribbon, we rip it and we wear it over our hearts. We wear that ribbon as an outward sign of our grief,” she said. “A year ago, we gathered and started to wear ribbons blue and yellow, because we are all Israel. We are all the people of Israel. And each day for the last year, we have gathered in different ways, in mourning and in grief, outwardly walking in a world that sometimes felt like no one knew what we were carrying except those others wearing the same ribbon.”
Those same people recited the prayer, then together joined Biton and Cantors Eyal Bitton of Neveh Shalom and Rayna Green of Beth Israel in song – a joyous rendition of “Salaam,” with its recurring lyric, “Od yavo shalom aleinu,” meaning “Peace will come upon us, yet,” followed by HaTikvah – powerful in its connection as Israel’s national anthem and a nearly 150-year-old elegy of Jewish aspiration, but also in its title alone. 
“The Hope.”
A recording of the service is available at youtube.com/watch?v=17TTSCbeALo.