Let us scroll back to the era of the First Temple in Jerusalem, 2,600 years ago. The Babylonians, under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the holy temple and drove the Jews from the Kingdom of Judea into exile. Forty-eight years later, during the reign of Cyrus the Great, the Jews returned to Jerusalem and under King Solomon’s sovereignty were able to build the Second Temple. Then in 70 CE, the Jewish people suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Titus of Rome, and — except for a remnant who managed to remain in Israel — Jews were exiled, enslaved, or murdered by the conquerors.

The surviving Jews found themselves a landless people, sometimes welcomed or begrudgingly tolerated by the inhabitants of foreign lands. The First Crusade erupted in 1096 in Western Germany along the Rhine River, a thousand years after the Jews lost their homeland. The Crusade led to the mass slaughter of Jews who had settled in Rhineland, and the same fate awaited them later in the Holy Land.

One of the worst antisemitic massacres of the Middle Ages took place in England in 1190; it is known as the York pogrom. The city’s entire Jewish community was trapped by an angry mob inside the tower of York Castle. Members of the Jewish community were forcibly baptized or murdered by the attackers. The survivors of the carnage were summarily expelled from England.

For over two millennia, we Jews have suffered a long and woeful history of oppression, expulsion, and murder. What began in Babylonia, continued in Rome as a never-ending stream of persecution that persisted during the Crusades which flowed into the infamous Spanish pogrom of 1391, when Sephardic Jews were given the option of conversion to Catholicism or death. By 1492, any Jews fortunate to survive, were expelled from Spain.

Following those dark and dangerous days, the remaining Jews scattered throughout the world in what is called the Diaspora. Unfortunately, instead of receiving a friendly and neighborly welcome, they were greeted by Eastern Europe populations with a succession of attacks and massacres in their small villages, known as shtetls. Most notable was the uprising of Cossacks in what is known as the Khmelnitsky pogrom that swept through Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Jews were brutally murdered during the massacres between the years 1648 and 1667.

Two-hundred years passed before Europe’s festering antisemitism once again erupted into violence. Beginning in 1881, the renewal of pogroms plagued the Jewish communities in southern Russia, when thousands of shtetls and their inhabitants were eliminated, culminating in the murder of 250,000 Jews in Ukraine between the years of 1918 and 1920.

Then came the Holocaust. From 1933 to 1945, Germany, with the assistance of all too willing European collaborators, embarked upon the state-sponsored persecution and industrialized murder of six million European Jewish men, women, and children.

Three years after the end of World War II, the modern State of Israel was established. But only one day after Israel’s declaration of Independence in 1948, five Arab armies sought to purge the region of Jews. This time it was different; the Jews once again had a homeland to defend. They successfully defeated the existential threat of annihilation posed by the neighboring Arab countries.

The question of, will “Never Again” ever end, was abruptly and savagely answered again on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, when approximately 1,200 people were murdered and 250 others abducted into Gaza, including children and infants. Today, the vulnerable Jewish shtetls of yesteryear no longer exist because the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), world Jewry, and morally driven Gentiles, have Israel’s back.

The Oct. 7 jihad occurred because of the genocidal aims of Hamas and its supporting cast of radical Islamist terrorists to rid Israel of its Jews. After thousands of years of being murdered simply for who we are, a vital lesson has been learnt. Elie Wiesel expressed it best: “I learned to trust the threats of enemies before the promises of friends.”

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