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How an Israeli TikToker’s little-known song became the soundtrack to emotional wartime reunions
(JTA) — An Israeli reservist on leave from the war in Gaza sneaks back into his house in the middle of the night to surprise his wife and sons. Another opens the door of his daughter’s preschool classroom and steps inside. Another stands behind his mother’s desk at work, waiting for her to turn and see him.
In each video, and hundreds of others just like them, a Hebrew song with the lyrics “Good days will come…” builds to its crescendo as the soldier’s family falls upon him.
The song seems tailor-made as an anthem for the emotional reunions that are providing Israelis a rare spark of hope at a grim time. “Even in the darkest hours of the night, there will always be a small star that will shine for you, for yourself and the way home,” the singer croons. “It’s always darkest before the sunrise.”
Yet the singer, Yagel Oshri, didn’t write the song for the war that the soldiers have been called to fight, which began Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking hundreds of hostages. “Two years ago I wrote the first version — not even from my personal perspective,” says Oshri, 23. His friend was depressed because her boyfriend dumped her, so he was trying to tell her, “Just smile, it’s all OK.”
היה געגוע
Few people heard the song since, even as Oshri became one of Israel’s rising stars on TikTok. As the driving force behind the Oshri Family account, Oshri accumulated followers with his made-for-social-media humor, often involving his two younger brothers and mother in videos made in the family home in Moshav Elikhin in central Israel. But behind the scenes, he was struggling in a way that changed the way he thought about his song.
“When I went through a depression, I realized you can’t just smile and get over it,” he said. So six months ago, he went to hit-making musician Offir Cohen’s studio and played him the first four lines of the revised song: “The family, friends, maybe going out/deep profound conversations late at night/dealing with change, old habits/the soul is at war with karma…”
Cohen told him to drop everything and the two went to the studio with a guitar and within “seven minutes” finished the song — lyrics, melody and all. “It flowed like a river,” Oshri recalls. They released the song on Aug. 15.
Galgalatz, the premier pop radio station in Israel, rejected it for their weekly playlist. “Maybe they just didn’t get it, they didn’t understand the heaviness,” Oshri says, with no bitterness. He uploaded the song to Apple Music, Spotify and, of course, TikTok instead.
There, “Getting over Depression” gained a small following. In late August, a clip Oshri posted on TikTok of himself playing on a keyboard with his brother at his side garnered dozens of supportive comments. By the end of September, he posted a duet in tribute to what he said was being tagged 1,000 times on the platform.
But nothing could have prepared him for what happened after Oct. 7. Like so many other Israelis, he was personally affected by the attack when his brother’s partner, 22-year-old Kim Dukarker, was killed along with hundreds of others at the Nova music festival. And like so many others, he sprang into action, giving back however he could — by performing for families evacuated from danger zones and soldiers called up as part of the biggest mobilization in Israel’s history.
Between the live shows and the ability of users on Instagram and TikTok to add favorite songs as soundtracks to their clips, “Getting over Depression” soon became ubiquitous — particularly when soldiers used it as a soundtrack to their surprise visits home.
Now, Israelis can’t get away from the song. It’s looping endlessly on the radio, including on Galgalatz — “I’m happy they get it now,” Oshri said — and in countless social media videos. Entire army units have sung along to the song. There’s even a spoof of a reservist trying to escape it, and TikTok videos of American Jewish musicians, like Orthodox singer Aryeh Kuntzler, performing it.
מקדישים לכם את השיר בתוך לב עזה! צה״ל חזק #צהל #עזה #israel
The song has streamed more than 3.5 million times on Spotify, making Oshri the second-most listened-to Israeli artist, and has been used on 17,000 TikTok videos, mostly of reunions. A prominent TV presenter shared the music set against clips of just-freed hostages, including 9-year-old Ohad Munder running through a hospital corridor to hug his family. That video got over 1 million views.
“I feel like God gave me a mission, to make people happy with this song,” Oshri says. “It’s a happy song. I think that Israel, in its DNA, is a happy nation. We like to say ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’” or the Jewish people live, a traditional phrase that itself has been renewed in a wartime song released Oct. 19, by Eyal Golan. “We like to say, ‘There will be good days to come.’”
Oshri’s song joins in a long tradition of Israeli songs giving hope at tenuous moments, including the classic “Yihiye Tov,” or “Things Will Get Better,” which a 22-year-old David Broza wrote with poet Yonatan Geffen in 1977 on the eve of peace negotiations with Egypt.
With every war, a few songs capture the public’s imagination. In 1967, “We Shall Pass,” by Yehiel Mohar and Moshe Wilensky, was written to raise the morale of the country. Even more iconic was Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” written only three weeks before the war — and to which she added a new verse when Israel took control of East Jerusalem.
Sometimes singers become synonymous with wars. Yehoram Gaon, who sang “The Last War” in 1973 for the troops during the Yom Kippur War (“I promise you little girl, this will be the last war…”) is now back with a new version of his 1984 patriotic battle cry, “You Won’t Beat Us,” whose video features flag-waving soldiers and rumbling tanks.
“Music can produce shared allegiances and feelings of unity. In times of extreme crisis, people turn to the music that they most need as an attempt to stabilize their emotions [so they can] continue and persist,” says Murray Forman, professor of Media & Screen Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. After 9/11 he wrote the analysis “Soundtrack to a Crisis: Music Context, Discourse,” in the journal Television and New Media.
“Music has acquired new significance in relation to the atrocities of the terrorist actions,” he wrote then. But what he didn’t consider 20 years ago was that “along with the music of peace and healing and mourning and patriotically infused anger and nationalistic chauvinism (which each proliferated in the U.S. after 9-11 and probably does in other such circumstances), there might also be music of fear and dread and even celebration, depending on what communities we’re talking about,” he said.
Yagel Oshri meets and sings with the family of Raz Ben Ami, bottom right, who was released the day before as part of deal between Hamas and Israel. Her husband Husband Ohad remains captive in Gaza. (Courtesy Yagel Oshri)
“Maybe one thing is for all sides to try to listen closely to the music each other is creating and listening to.”
A number of English-language songs have also been adopted to epitomize the war. Skylar Grey’s “I’m Coming Home,” which has been used as a soundtrack for many American soldiers’ homecomings, was recently adapted in honor of the hostages still held in Gaza. Shiri Maimon sings it in a video featuring a display in Jerusalem of 240 beams of light, each representing a hostage. On Nov. 6, hundreds of the hostages’ family members gathered at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre to record a version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” in an event produced by Ben Yefet, who conducts Israel’s popular Koolulam singalongs.
Yet for many American Jews, Israeli anthems are a way for them to connect to the country. Yael Weinman, a lawyer from Washington, D.C., started creating shareable Spotify playlists that she called “Do Not Despair” when the war started. It included pop songs like “Out of the Depths” by Idan Reichl, “Chai” by Ofra Haza and “Hurts but Less” by Yehuda Poliker.
“For me, being in America and being so far away physically from Israel right now, it’s a way to feel closer to Israel at a time when being so disconnected is so painful,” said Weinman. She said it’s hard for many people like her not to be there. “Listening to the music is a way to feel more connected,” she says. “It’s comforting for me to listen to songs in Hebrew — it’s a way to feel comforted and not to despair.”
Oshri has been busy since the war pushed his song into the spotlight. In addition to working on new music that he hopes will bring comfort to his nation at war, he has played over 90 performances since the war started — at army bases, for wounded soldiers, for evacuated families, at funerals.
“I just sang for a kidnapped woman that was released,” Oshri says in the car from Israel, referring to Raz Ben Ami, who was released by Hamas on Nov. 29. Her husband Ohad remains captive in Gaza.
On Sunday, Oshri announced that he would begin selling jewelry with lines from his now-iconic song etched in his handwriting, with the proceeds to benefit the Israeli army.
Oshroi told JTA that every time he sings the song, in his heart he dedicates it to Dukarker. But he says he knows “Getting Over Depression” doesn’t belong to him any more. “It’s Israel’s song,” he said. “It’s the song our nation has chosen to listen to.”
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Twitter AI’s Spree of Antisemitic Answers Provokes European Union Meeting as US Military Signs Deal With Company
European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on June 17, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Yves Herman
Following an update earlier this month to xAI’s Grok chatbot which resulted in a wave of antisemitic and pro-Hitler responses to users on X/Twitter, the European Commission summoned representatives from billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company to a Tuesday meeting to explain themselves.
The move comes after Italian parliament member Sandro Gozi urged for the Commission to begin a formal inquiry, as “the case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space.”
Poland’s Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski had also called for the Commission to take action and said that the Polish government would consider banning the app.
Due to the size of the X platform, the site falls under the European Union’s DSA which requires transparency about operations. Musk’s app already faces multiple investigations by the Commission.
On Wednesday, following the initial antisemitic statements from Grok, X’s Linda Yaccarino, the company’s CEO, announced her resignation.
On Monday, xAI announced a $200 million deal to provide Grok to the US military. The company stated that “under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers.” Customers in the plan could “use the Grok family of products to accelerate America – from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.”
The Pentagon also announced on Monday other AI companies would receive contracts, including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
Douglas Matty, chief digital and AI officer at the Defense Department, said that “leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”
Also on Monday, Musk unveiled a new release to the AI capabilities on X. The Companions feature will allow users to interact with cartoon characters, including a mischievous fox and an anime-style goth girl named Ani.
On Tuesday, xAI put out a statement explaining that it had “spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated.” The company said it had “tweaked the prompts and have shared the details on GitHub for transparency. We are actively monitoring and will implement further adjustments as needed.”
The post Twitter AI’s Spree of Antisemitic Answers Provokes European Union Meeting as US Military Signs Deal With Company first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Synagogue, Holocaust Memorial Vandalized in Poland After Politician Denies Holocaust
An antisemitic slur spray-painted on the ruins of a former synagogue in Dukla, Poland. Photo: World Jewish Restitution Organization
Two Jewish sites in Dukla, Poland, were vandalized over the weekend mere days after Polish member of the European Parliament (MEP) Grzegorz Braun claimed gas chambers at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were fake and repeated an antisemitic blood libel in a live radio interview.
Vandals spray-painted the word “F–k” followed by a Star of David on the ruins of a former synagogue that was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and a memorial commemorating Holocaust victims located at the entrance of the Jewish cemetery in Dukla was defaced with a swastika and the word “Palestine,” according to the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO). The memorial honors Jews of Dukla and the surrounding areas who were murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust.
The two Jewish sites in Dukla are cared for by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ), which was established in 2002 by the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland and the WJRO to protect and commemorate Poland’s Jewish heritage sites.
“These hateful acts are not only antisemitic, but they are also attempts to erase Jewish history and desecrate memory,” said WJRO President Gideon Taylor in a released statement on Tuesday. “Polish authorities must take swift and serious action to identify the perpetrators and ensure the protection of Jewish heritage sites in Dukla and across the country.”
“The vandalism of Jewish sites in Dukla—with swastikas and anti-Israel slurs—is not an isolated act,” insisted Jack Simony, director general of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF), in a statement to The Algemeiner. The nonprofit focuses on preserving the memory of the Jewish community in Oświęcim (Auschwitz) and maintains the Auschwitz Jewish Center, the last remaining synagogue in town.
“While we cannot say definitively that it [the vandalism] was sparked by Grzegorz Braun’s Holocaust denial, his rhetoric contributes to an atmosphere where hatred is emboldened and truth is under assault,” added Simony. “Braun’s lies are not harmless — they are dangerous. Holocaust denial fuels antisemitism and, too often, violence. This is why Holocaust education matters … because when we fail to confront lies, we invite their consequences. Memory must be defended, not only for the sake of the past, but for the safety of our future.”
On July 10, a ceremony was held commemorating the 84th anniversary of the 1941 Jedwabne massacre, when hundreds of Polish Jews were massacred – mostly by their neighbors – in the northeastern town in German-occupied Poland. The ceremony was attended by dignitaries and faith leaders including Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Israeli Deputy Ambassador Bosmat Baruch. Groups of anti-Israel and far-right activists — including MEP Braun and his supporters – tried to disrupt the event by holding banners with antisemitic slogans and blocking the vehicles of the attendees, according to Polish radio.
Hours later, during a live radio broadcast, Braun falsely claimed the Auschwitz gas chambers were “a lie” and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum was promoting “pseudo-history.” He also claimed that Jewish “ritual murder is a fact.” Polish prosecutors launched an investigation into Braun’s comments, they announced that same day. Under Article 55 of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in Poland.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum issued a swift condemnation of Braun’s remarks and said it intents to pursue legal action. The Institute of National Remembrance — which is the largest research, educational and archival institution in Poland – also denounced Braun’s remarks, saying there is “well-documented” evidence supporting the existence of gas chambers. His comments were also condemned by the Embassy of Israel in Poland, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and the US Embassy in Warsaw, which said that his actions “distort history, desecrate memory, or spread antisemitism.” AJCF called on the European Parliament to consider disciplinary measures against Braun, including potential censure or expulsion.
Auschwitz Jewish Center Director Tomek Kuncewicz said Braun’s comments are “an act of violence against truth, against survivors, and against the legacy of our shared humanity.” AJCF Chairman Simon Bergson called the politician’s remarks “blatant and baseless lies,” while Simony described them as “a calculated act of antisemitic incitement” that “must be met with legal consequences and universal moral condemnation.”
The post Jewish Synagogue, Holocaust Memorial Vandalized in Poland After Politician Denies Holocaust first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Coalition of 400 Jewish Orgs and Synagogues Urge Teachers Union to Reverse Decision Cutting Ties with ADL
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. Photo Credit: ADL.
Following a vote by the National Education Association (NEA) on July 6 to end its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 400 Jewish communal groups, education organizations, and religious institutions have come together to call for the influential teachers union to change course.
“We are writing to express our deep concerns about the growing level of antisemitic activity within teachers’ unions, particularly since the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023,” the letter to NEA President Becky Pringle stated. “Passage of New Business Item (NBI) 39 at the National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly this past weekend, which shockingly calls for the boycott of the Anti-Defamation League, is just the latest example of open hostility toward Jewish educators, students and families coming from national and local teachers’ unions and their members.”
In addition to the ADL, signatories of the letter included American Jewish Committee (AJC), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Federations of North America, #EndJewHatred, American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith International, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis), Combat Antisemitism Movement, Democratic Majority for Israel, StandWithUs, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Zioness Movement, and Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
The group told Pringle that “we have heard directly from NEA members who have shared their experiences ranging from explicit and implicit antisemitism within the union to a broader pattern of insensitivity toward legitimate concerns of Jewish members – including at the recently concluded Representative Assembly. We are also deeply troubled by a broader pattern of union activity over the past 20 months that has targeted or alienated Jewish members and the wider Jewish community.”
The letter to Pringle included an addendum providing examples of objectionable rhetoric. These named such incidents as the Oakland Education Association (OEA) putting out a statement calling for “an end to the occupation of Palestine” and the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) accusing Israel of genocide.
The coalition of 400 organizations urged the NEA to “take immediate action” and suggested such steps as rejecting NBI 39, issuing a “strong condemnation” of antisemitism within the union, drafting a plan to counter ongoing antisemitism in affiliate chapters, and opposing “any effort to use an educator’s support for the existence of Israel as a means to attack their identity.”
ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X that “Excluding @ADL’s educational resources from schools is not just an attack on our org, but on the entire Jewish community. We urge the @NEAToday Executive Committee to reverse this biased, fringe effort and reaffirm its commitment to supporting all Jewish students and educators.”
The post Coalition of 400 Jewish Orgs and Synagogues Urge Teachers Union to Reverse Decision Cutting Ties with ADL first appeared on Algemeiner.com.