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A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools
(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.
The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.
The movement to police children’s literature — particularly graphic novels — on the basis of race, sex and gender has encompassed thousands of different titles, and it has grown to become a potent political force with potential reverberations for the 2024 presidential race. The official who has played one of the biggest roles in enabling parents to challenge school library books, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now running for president.
To defenders of the illustrated book — including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups — the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the movement is bigoted and misguided.
Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Florida Rep. Randy Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Calling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine continued, “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
Here is what you need to know about the book, the criticism it’s facing and the context that has made it a flashpoint in a deepening culture war.
What is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’?
Published in 2018, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is a new, abridged version of Frank’s famous diary presented in comic-book format. The project was authorized by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank, which controls the copyright to the diary Otto rescued after he survived the Holocaust. Anne herself perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out for most of the war with her family in an Amsterdam annex.
The Oscar-nominated Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, together with illustrator David Polonsky, put the new book together. It was intended as a companion piece to the 2021 animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” which Folman directed.
While the film tells the fanciful story of Anne’s imaginary friend Kitty coming to life and wandering through modern-day Amsterdam, the book is a straightforward, though heavily truncated, rendition of Anne’s original diary. All of the entries it reproduces are taken from her original text, and dialogue between the characters in the annex is based on Anne’s own recollections of their conversations. Some of its supporters resist the label “graphic novel,” which they say implies the story is fictional.
The new book, the foundation says, is not meant to replace Frank’s original diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Secret Annex” and in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” That book, along with subsequent editions that restored some passages edited out of the first publication, continues to be published and widely read in dozens of languages.
Why and how is the book being challenged?
A handful of parent activists, the largest “parents’ rights” group in the country and at least one Republican state lawmaker — Fine — have specifically gone after “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as part of their larger campaign against what they say is obscene and pornographic content in schools. After a few isolated incidents of parental opposition to the book over the last year, their efforts have gained steam in recent months.
Organized by members of “parents’ rights” groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, parents nationwide have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, the vast majority of which deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality. This movement began as parents organized to oppose COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, as well as recent political controversies involving LGBTQ-focused issues such as medical procedures for trans children.
The groups operate under the presumption that their children’s educators and librarians might be trying to sneak leftist viewpoints (including what they call “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”) into the classroom, or even that they are “grooming” their children.
Increasingly, such parents have trained this focus on books, and have become particularly sensitive to any literary depictions of sex and/or LGBTQ identity — particularly in graphic or comic-book format. Some of the most-banned books in schools across the country are graphic novels and memoirs with LGBTQ themes, including “Gender Queer” and “Fun Home.”
“People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America. “Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.”
Florida has emerged as a frontier for this movement under the leadership of DeSantis, who is a Republican. Under new laws he championed, educators can face felony charges for making obscene material accessible to students; the state also has a new law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, that prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual identity or orientation in elementary and middle school, and limits it in high school.
Why are parents complaining specifically about the graphic adaptation?
Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.
These passages are Anne’s own writing, and were part of her actual diary. Folman and Polonsky reproduce them in the book and show a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition.
This illustration, which is presented as coming from Anne’s imagination, has garnered the most intense blowback from parents. In Facebook groups devoted to book challenges, some members have shared screenshots of the page as evidence of the adaptation’s obscene qualities, questioning why any parent would want their child to read it.
Some people challenging the book have offered other explanations. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty whose Florida district has removed the book, told JTA that she was troubled by the fact that the adaptation only replicates a small percentage of the original diary, while leaving out what she believed to be crucial context: the original epilogue that shifted from Anne’s first-person narration to a larger study of the victims of the Holocaust. (An afterword does appear in the graphic adaptation.)
Inveighing against current child literacy levels she said are woefully low, Justice was also infuriated by the idea that Frank’s diary needed an illustrated version to begin with.
“Anne wrote the diary when she was 13,” she said. “So the diary is written at a level where children of that age can completely understand it.”
What has happened when parents have challenged the book?
The book first grabbed headlines in August 2022, when administrators at Keller ISD, a public school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, ordered staff to remove it (along with a selection of other books) from their shelves. The book had been challenged by a single parent the previous year, and the school’s new board, backed by right-wing special interest groups, had ordered its review policy for classroom materials to be completely overhauled. Any books that had ever been challenged in the district were to be removed from circulation until the matter had been resolved. Following public outcry, the book was returned to Keller’s shelves a week later.
A second Texas school district, Katy ISD outside Houston, had also placed the book under review during the 2021-22 school year, ultimately determining it was only appropriate for high school students.
The book soon landed on the radar of parent activists in Florida. One Florida school district, Indian River County Schools on the state’s Atlantic coast, ruled in April that the book was “not age-appropriate” at any level of instruction, including high school. A parent there had challenged it, claiming that the book “minimizes the Holocaust.”
After a review, the district agreed with the parent, telling JTA it had determined the book to be “a fictional novel,” “not the real diary of Anne Frank,” and filled with “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent issued a statement backing the ruling, citing Florida’s statewide Holocaust education mandate as a reason why the school should not make the book available to students.
The national leadership of Moms For Liberty issued a statement siding with the district — and emphasizing that Anne Frank’s diary is not itself objectionable.
“There are multiple versions of Anne Frank’s diary of varying age appropriateness available to students,” the statement said. “Only this ONE version was removed.”
Justice, the Moms for Liberty cofounder, is a former board member for Indian River County Schools and still lives in the area. She told JTA she does not like the book either and said its removal was a sign of the system working as it should: School administrators took a parent’s challenge seriously and came to a decision.
“If the superintendent and the school board wanted it there, it would be there,” she said. “If the Holocaust education group in the county had wanted it there — these are Jewish people — had wanted it there, it would be there.”
Another Florida school district, Clay County Public Schools outside Jacksonville, has kept the book restricted from student access for some five months and counting, following a single parental complaint earlier this year. That parent, Bruce Friedman, is Jewish, and has become a leading voice of the broader book challenge movement. He challenged the graphic adaptation along with hundreds of other books in his district that he deemed to be inappropriate for students. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming,” he told JTA about the adaptation.
Facing a backlog of book challenges, Clay County in April altered its challenge policy to make it harder for parents like Friedman to file blanket requests to remove many books at once for broadly defined reasons. But notably, the district retained the pending challenge to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” even after its policy change. A final decision on the book is still pending.
How are the book’s supporters responding to the criticism?
Activists opposed to the book banning movement and experts on the diary’s publication history say critics of the Anne Frank adaptation are wrong even about the most basic facts of their objections.
First, while the visual format of the graphic adaptation (which incorporates some surreal imagery) arguably lies somewhere between fact and artistic interpretation, and its rendition of the diary is severely abridged, the book did not invent the passages these parents find objectionable, as some have alleged. Those came, word for word, from Frank herself. Both passages were fully restored to her English-language diary beginning with versions published in the 1980s, largely without incident.
A crucial part of the argument against the graphic adaptation is the idea that both of these passages were excised from the initial English-language edition of the diary. Both Friedman and Fine have told JTA they have no recollection of having read the passages with sexual content in their own childhood memories of the diary.
They almost certainly did, said Ruth Franklin, a book critic and author who is writing a book about Frank and her diary to be published next year by Yale University Press. According to Franklin’s research, the very first English-language edition of the diary did indeed include one of the two passages the parents are now objecting to: the part where Anne discusses her attraction to another girl.
Franklin said that, contrary to popular belief, Otto Frank was the one who pushed for the passage to be included in the diary’s first English-language edition after it was excised from the Dutch original. Otto is often portrayed as having been responsible for removing the passage so as to sanitize Anne’s language for a general audience.
Contemporary parents who insist they did not read the passage as children, she said, are “misremembering.”
“If they were to actually go to the library and open up the edition that has been in print since 1952, they would be unhappily surprised to find what’s there,” Franklin said. “It seems inconsistent to me to go after the graphic adaptation and not the diary itself.”
At least one parent has objected to the unabridged text-based version of the diary before. In 2013, a Michigan mom challenged an unabridged edition of the diary, citing the same passages that today’s parents are objecting to in the graphic adaptation. She argued that the unabridged diary was “inappropriate for the middle school,” and tried to push her daughter’s district to swap out the “definitive” edition of the diary for the original version that excised one of the objectionable passages. The parent’s objection made national news, was the subject of much condemnation and was ultimately rejected by the district.
Conditions in schools have changed in the last decade, with parents in multiple states newly empowered to challenge books in their children’s schools. The movement has caught up not only the graphic version of Anne Frank’s diary but a growing number of other titles with Jewish and Holocaust themes.
Meehan of PEN America suggested that the parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes, meaning that the text had become an example of “intersectionality,” or representing more than one marginalized group. Some of the book’s opponents, including Justice, have separately attacked the idea of intersectionality.
“When there are multiple themes represented in a book,” Meehan said, “then that book becomes even more a focus of efforts to remove it.”
For the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss group that controls the diary and authorized the adaptation, the situation is clear-cut. From across the Atlantic, the group issued a statement responding to challenges of the diary in all its forms: “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.”
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Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on
(JTA) — Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and GOP opponent Stacy Garrity faced off on Wednesday in a heated gubernatorial debate, clashing over most policy issues — with the notable exception of Israel.
“I want to recognize the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, where 1,200 innocent people were killed, including 49 Americans,” said Garrity, referring to the third anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“I want to remember the lives that were stolen, the families that were changed forever, and the Americans that didn’t make it home,” she added.
While Garrity, Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, Shapiro has a 25 percentage point lead in a poll released Wednesday. Both candidates won their primaries uncontested in May, and both have been outspoken against antisemitism.
Shapiro, who himself is Jewish, likewise recognized “the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre” at the debate. He recalled how “Hamas, a terrorist organization, broke into Israel and murdered 1,200 innocents, took over 250 hostage, including many Americans.”
“This is a moment where my heart stands with the people of Israel,” he said. “My heart stands with the Jewish community, who I know are grieving as a result of this.”
“This is a moment where we need to stand together against terrorism, against hate and against antisemitism,” the governor added.
Although the candidates shared similar perspectives on Israel during Wednesday’s debate, they clashed on numerous other topics, including the death penalty, voter identification, taxes and tariffs.
Asked by the debate moderator about the plunging support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Shapiro replied that he has “been very, very consistent” in both his “love of Israel” and his disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shapiro then noted that Israelis will head to the polls in just a few weeks to choose their next leader. He expressed hope that they would not elect Netanyahu, whom he said “has led Israel down a very dangerous and isolated path.”
“I want America to have a strong relationship with Israel and with the Israeli government,” Shapiro added. “That’s not possible right now with the Netanyahu government in charge.”
Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats nationwide, was among the final candidates considered by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential search in the 2024 election. He is also seen as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful.
But Shapiro has also faced the challenges posed by increasing antisemitism in America. During Harris’s search, for example, a website and social media feed labeled him “No Genocide Josh” over his support for Israel.
In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to Shapiro’s house just hours after his family had conducted a Passover seder. In 2018, while Shapiro was serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a terrorist killed 11 people and injured six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh..
Garrity, meanwhile, has more than tripled Pennsylvania’s investment in Israel bonds in her current role. She invested $20 million after the Oct. 7 attack and another $35 million in July 2025.
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Protesters overrun Oct. 7 Israeli peace vigil attended by Mamdani
(New York Jewish Week) — Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters on Wednesday night overran a vigil marking Oct. 7 attended by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The demonstrators swamped the area of Union Square Park that was supposed to host the event held by Israelis for Peace, a left-wing peace group. The organizers moved the vigil to a nearby spot in the park surrounded by police barricades as speakers struggled to be heard above the protesters. Attendees held electrically lit candles and signs reading, “Not one more life.”
Upon learning Mamdani was present, the pro-Palestinian protesters booed and broke into a chant of “Traitor!” and “Zohran, what do you say? How many boots did you lick today?”
The mayor stood solemnly throughout the event and did not speak at the vigil or address the protesters.
One protester yelled at Israelis for Peace organizers: “We don’t want peace with Israelis, bro! We sent your people to hell on October 7.” Other protesters wielded megaphones and drums while chanting anti-Israel slogans, including “Gaza will be liberated!” and “Israel is a terrorist state!”
Earlier in the evening, protesters were seen grabbing the electric candles intended for the vigil and mockingly singing the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila.”
Another protester in the vigil area shouted out his disapproval of Mamdani: “He’s 100% Muslim but as of now, he stands as an ambassador of Zionism and U.S. imperialism.”
And someone else carried a poster depicting Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people three years ago Wednesday.
Amid the cacophony, Brad Lander, the Jewish Democratic nominee running to represent parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn in Congress, took the microphone during the vigil to recite the words of the mother of a 20-year-old man who was murdered at the Nova music festival three years ago. He looked visibly shaken as the evening progressed, watching the protesters while speakers shared testimonies of people killed on Oct. 7.
Speakers also shared testimonies of Palestinians killed by the Israel Defense Forces, and the event included the group being led in a Muslim prayer. Many speakers referred to Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a “genocide.”
The vigil ended with the participants raising their candles and reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer honoring the dead. As they filed out of the event, the protesters shouted “Death to the IDF!”
Lander told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that throughout the ceremony he felt “a deep and profound sadness for the testimony” of those lost, recalling that he’s met family members of some of the victims, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose stories were read.
“That level of heartbreak is a lot more than the level of having some people shouting,” he said. “The flattening of empathy is another sadness. And the fact that this is one of the few places where people even try to say Kaddish together and to mourn both Israeli lives lost on Oct. 7 and 75,000 Palestinian lives lost in Israel’s war since, is also sad. And that’s why it was important to do.”
Amichai Lau-Lavie, who leads New York’s Lab Shul and led the Mourner’s Kaddish, told JTA that “In the heat of these protest battles, there’s no room for nuance. It’s the slurs and the slogans. And what we saw here tonight was hatred that is coming from a good place of justice and freedom, but is not attuned to what we’re doing here.” He described that goal as one that acknowledges that both peoples’ futures are intertwined.
Lau-Lavie also praised the mayor for coming. “I can say I’m glad about the fact that the mayor was here and witnessed this animosity, and stood with us,” he noted. “For all his flaws, and there are many, I hope he got something.”
Despite the war of words, both gatherings disbanded peacefully. No arrests were made.
Amid the rival gatherings, Ross Glick, a New York pro-Israel activist and former executive director of Betar US, a far-right staunchly Zionist group, arrived with a group of counter-protesters holding Israeli flags. They were swiftly confronted by anti-Israel protesters, and the two sides got into a shouting match as they stood separated by a barrier.
The pro-Palestinian protesters had held a rally at City Hall, organized by Pal-Awda and various student groups, before heading to the location of the vigil. They condemned Israel and the United States for the war in Gaza, but also criticized Mamdani for capitulating “to Zionist pressure.” Some carried anti-Mamdani signs, including one that depicted Mamdani rolling out a red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The throng of protesters outside City Hall chanted “Free Palestine,” “Globalize the intifada,” “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” and “Israel is a terrorist state.”
One protester held a sign reading “Operation Epstein Fury,” a play on Operation Epic Fury. Another held a sign that read “Liberation in action Oct. 7.” Nearby, an Israeli flag was held up with the text “Death cult” and an inverted red triangle — a Hamas symbol — atop the Star of David.
Earlier in the day, Jews in the city who marked Oct. 7 expressed fear about the political environment three years on from the attacks.
Toni Rabin, an 83-year-old Upper West Sider who lived in Israel in the 1970s, told JTA that she calls herself a progressive and has attended protests against President Donald Trump. But like many New York Jews, she gets unnerved by Mamdani.
“I’m burying my head in the sand a bit, because it’s a little too much for me to handle,” she admitted. She timed her arrival for her swim at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan to coincide with the commemoration of the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in southern Israel.
“We should never forget,” she said. “We already have forgotten so much about the Holocaust, and there are very few people left who can speak about it anymore. They’re dying out. … So, we have to remember the horrific event that took place, the shock.”
She spoke over the sound of a cellist who performed for a small crowd in a lobby that was otherwise packed with small children having lunch with grownups. There was art on display by the Israeli artist Zeev Engelmayer from his “Strokes of Hope” exhibition.
Throughout the city on Wednesday, New Yorkers found themselves coping with the intense memories of learning about the 1,200 people, mostly Israelis but also foreign nationals, slain in Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the majority of them civilians. Meanwhile, Palestinian residents and their supporters mourned the more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in the ensuing Gaza war, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.
Hours before arriving at the vigil, Mamdani posted a statement on X in which he paid tribute both to Israelis killed by Hamas attackers in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to Palestinians killed in the Gaza war that followed.
His statement infuriated leaders in the mainstream Jewish community, who read his post as yet another vehicle for accusing the Israeli government of genocide and apartheid.
Wednesday “marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others,” the mayor said in his X post. “We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”
He went on, however, to say that the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presided over an “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” saying that Israel “has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — including more than 21,000 children.”
Mamdani continued, “Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
The city’s Jewish Community Relations Council was scathing in its response, saying that Mamdani “continues to fall short” of bringing New Yorkers together.
“It does not honor the dead to pit them against each other,” it said in its statement. “It is shameful. Today, Jewish New Yorkers across the five boroughs walked through metal detectors to drop off our children at preschool, thanked the police officers posted outside our synagogues for keeping us safe, tucked in our Jewish stars on the subway, and felt the gut punch of grief remembering the 1,200 innocent people who were slaughtered in their homes, in front of their families, and dancing at a music festival just because they were Jewish.”
Lander, favored to win his race for Congress next month, said on X ahead of the vigil that there was room to mourn the dead on all sides. “On this third anniversary of October 7th, a good start is to try to resist the flattening of empathy, to let ourselves weep for all the lives lost, the children killed, the families torn apart, the homes destroyed.”
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Newly aired recordings of paramedic Amit Mann’s final hours renew push to let families access Oct. 7 records
(JTA) — Three years after paramedic Amit Mann, 22, was killed by Hamas while treating the wounded in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, newly aired recordings of her final calls revealed fresh and harrowing details about her last hours.
The recordings, aired by Channel 12 on Tuesday, prompted her sister, Haviva Mann Izikson, to renew an appeal for a centralized system to ensure other families are not left searching for similar records years later.
The calls capture Amit repeatedly calling emergency services as Hamas terrorists overran Be’eri, seeking assistance while continuing to treat wounded residents.
The previously unknown calls came to light by chance, when, earlier this year, Mann Izikson contacted the Magen David Adom emergency service seeking the precise times of calls Amit had made on Oct. 7 as she updated a presentation she planned to give about her sister. MDA provided information on seven calls. Until then, the family had known of only four.
Mann Izikson said hearing them revealed both that what Amit endured was “even worse than we had thought” and the extent to which Amit continued caring for others even as the situation around her deteriorated.
“It showed me even more both the hell that she went through and, on the other hand, who she was. What she was dealing with, what she went through there, which was even worse than we had thought, and how despite all of that she keeps treating the wounded in every way she can,” Mann Izikson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Wednesday as she prepared to return to Be’eri for a memorial event at the dental clinic where Amit was killed.
The recordings trace Amit’s increasingly desperate attempts to summon help as terrorists closed in around the dental clinic. Hours later, she sent her sisters a chilling last message: “They’re here, in the clinic. I don’t think I’ll make it out of here. I love you.”
In one call, Amit is heard struggling to convey the scale of what was happening to a police dispatcher.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she told the dispatcher, describing wounded and dead people around her and continued gunfire. She asked whether the army or police had reached the kibbutz. When the dispatcher told her help was coming and urged her to stay inside, Amit began to cry. “Just tell me you’re here.”
Hours later, at 10:41 a.m., after seven calls to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency medical service, Amit made her final recorded call to police. “Listen, terrorists have infiltrated Be’eri! We urgently need an ambulance or police here. Come urgently to the dental clinic.”
Hearing the latest recordings was heartbreaking, Mann Izikson said. She was struck by Amit’s ability to pull herself together after desperate calls for help and return to caring for the wounded, comforting them, asking about their families, bringing them water and improvising with what little there was. Amit placed helmets beneath their heads and covered those who were cold from blood loss.
“She keeps them alive until her final moments, and she stays true to herself until her last breaths,” Mann Izikson said. “It just amazed us.”
Mann Izikson is urging the state to establish a central body that would collect all existing documentation from Oct. 7, including recordings held by emergency services and police as well as security-camera footage and other material, catalogue it by victim, and contact each family. Such a body, she said, should tell relatives: “We have documentation of your loved one. Would you like to receive it?”
“If the family wants it, then all of it should be provided to them proactively,” she added.
She pointed to the family of Gil Buyum, 55, a member of Be’eri’s security squad whom Amit treated after he was shot. In one call, Amit reported him wounded; in a later call, she reported that he had died.
The two recordings allowed Buyum’s widow, Ayelet, to narrow down the time of her husband’s death, Mann Izikson said. Buyum’s 22-year-old son, Inbar “Buri” Buyum, was also killed while trying to defend the kibbutz that morning.
“Only because of Amit’s recordings was she able to identify the 20-minute window in which he died,” Mann Izikson said. “That’s just one example of how someone can get some kind of closure from something like this.”
She said families should be able to decide for themselves whether they want such material. “It belongs to the families. It is the families’ material, and the families should decide what, if anything, to do with it.”
A law passed in July established an Oct. 7 Memory Authority slated to include an archive and centralize documentation of the attack. The law is due to take effect in January, but it is unclear whether the authority will match material to individual victims and notify their families.
JTA was unable to reach the Prime Minister’s Office and the Israel State Archives, the government body responsible for preserving state records, in time for publication.
Merav Israeli-Amarant, CEO and co-founder of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas, which released a major report in May documenting sexual violence during the attack and its aftermath, said Mann Izikson’s proposal was “profoundly important.”
“Families should not have to discover, years later and by chance, that recordings, footage, or other documentation connected to their loved ones exist,” Israeli-Amarant told JTA. She said there should be a mechanism that “approaches families with sensitivity,” while giving them the choice of whether to “receive it, view it, preserve it, or not engage with it at all.”
But Israeli-Amarant also said there was “unique importance” in preserving such material through civilian institutions, noting that many Oct. 7 families feel abandoned by the state and that some prefer documentation to be handled independently and “outside political considerations.”
Maya Gan-Zvi, manager of the National Library of Israel’s Bearing Witness: October 7 Archive, which has collected hundreds of thousands of files from the attack, cautioned that proactively approaching families, as Mann Izikson proposes, also raised ethical questions because families differ widely in how, and whether, they want to encounter such material.
“Some want to receive everything, and some do not want to know, or not yet,” Gan-Zvi told JTA, adding that even members of the same family may disagree. Contacting a family without first knowing its wishes could “reopen wounds,” she said, particularly in cases involving graphic material or footage filmed by the terrorists themselves.
Gan-Zvi said she favored a system in which bereaved families themselves would take the initiative, registering that they wanted to be contacted, specifying the types of material they wanted and receiving a description of what had been found before deciding whether to obtain it.
According to Israeli-Amarant, any system would face “significant” practical and legal hurdles because Oct. 7 material is scattered among government bodies, emergency services, police, the military, media outlets and private individuals, raising questions of ownership, privacy, consent and the rights of victims’ families.
Some recordings or footage may also be evidence in ongoing investigations or criminal proceedings against Hamas terrorists, she said, making chain of custody, publication restrictions and the integrity of those proceedings additional considerations.
Mann Izikson said providing documentation would help answer fundamental questions that remained unresolved.
“Three years later, we still don’t know the full truth and don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “Every piece of material like this can shed another bit of light and help us understand a little bit more.”
She has listened to the newly aired recordings repeatedly, echoing a pattern she described to JTA on the first anniversary of the attack, when she said she reread Amit’s messages from Oct. 7 every day, in part to piece together what happened during her sister’s final hours and try to come to terms with it.
It took two and a half days for Amit’s body to be identified. Mann Izikson told JTA at the time that when her sister was lowered into the grave, “I felt like they were burying half of my own child. I wanted to go in instead of her.”
Even amid the war, the hostage crisis and the wider grief in Israel on the first anniversary of Oct. 7, Mann Izikson said Amit’s loss eclipsed everything else. “There is all the rest — and the rest is painful and scary,” she said. “And then there is Amit and nothing else at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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