October 7, 2023, was many things. The deadliest day for Jews since 1945. The bloodiest day in Israel’s history. A body blow to its self-image as a haven for Jews. The first day of its longest-ever war. It was also our wedding day.
Except it nearly wasn’t. We—my partner Clara and I—had settled on October 6 and had sent feelers to venues, photographers and rabbis. But my mother protested that October 6 was the day of the assault that launched the Yom Kippur War—the worst day in Israel’s history, she added.
My father, who had been born in Israel a month after the state and was wounded in that 1973 war, said he was not bothered. But my mother was raised in the ruins of postwar Poland—her father was the only survivor in his extended family—and is a firm believer in omens.
So we sent the necessary follow-up emails. “We are now leaning toward October 7, rather than October 6. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks!”
I first met Clara in 2015 at the Washington, DC, think tank where I was deputy research director and she was an intern in her last year of college. Her beauty, intelligence and charm won me over completely, as they do everyone she meets. We started dating in early 2017, in the bewildering early days of the Trump era, and she started work at a research institute near the White House.
By 2019 she was ready to do a master’s degree. Her interests were religion and conflict. I told her I knew a place—and that my family had an apartment there to boot.
Clara soon felt at home in Israel, as much a surprise to me as to her. She is Argentinian American, and her only previous acquaintance with the country was a short trip we had made early in our relationship. Our planned year-to-two in Tel Aviv soon stretched to four.
“Terrible things happening in Israel today,” I wrote my family on Whatsapp half an hour later. “Mass Hamas infiltration of the south, 40+ killed, unknown number of civilian and soldier captives in Gaza. Nothing like this before.”
I proposed in late 2020, in the depths of the plague year, on a rooftop in Old Jerusalem. It was over dinner one day last summer that she told me she was ready.
We both wanted a small, intimate ceremony with only our closest family. We settled on the great navel of the world—Central Park, New York City. My parents and brother live there; her brother, father and his partner are nearby; and her mother could fly up from Argentina with comparative ease.
Online we found an ebullient and gifted female rabbi and an equally ebullient and gifted photographer, as well as a small restaurant in an old carriage house that we could have to ourselves. Clara’s father, a professional jazz musician, enlisted an Argentinian-Israeli guitarist friend to strum tango. We would be 12 people in all, with a wooden hilltop gazebo serving as chuppah. Not just a micro-wedding, but nano-nuptials.
In late September we landed in New York. The night before the ceremony, Clara stayed with her family at a hotel across the Hudson. I checked into the Omni in midtown.
Everything was set.
The alarm woke me at 8:00 a.m., alone, in the king-sized bed of what was to be our newlywed suite. I turned on my phone.
“Forty killed in attack from Gaza,” said the alert from The Times of Israel.
I opened the article but understood almost nothing. What of Iron Dome? Did Hamas launch a massive rocket attack on a soccer game, catching everyone exposed? Were these people killed by projectiles or bullets? My thoughts darted to the Second Intifada, to the 2002 Park Hotel massacre that killed 30 people at their Passover seder.
I opened Twitter to try to understand more. I saw an image of a young woman—we know now her name is Naama Levy—pushed into the back of a truck, her hands bound and her sweatpants bloodied around the crotch. I posted the image at 8:37, adding: “Warning: Extremely disturbing.”
Oren Kessler and his wife, Clara, at their wedding in Central Park, NYC. (Photo credit: Stacie Stine)
A minute later I posted again—above an image of several people facedown in blood at a bus stop in Sderot: “The barbarity and cruelty of this assault is emerging minute by minute, hour by hour.”
“Terrible things happening in Israel today,” I wrote my family on Whatsapp half an hour later. “Mass Hamas infiltration of the south, 40+ killed, unknown number of civilian and soldier captives in Gaza. Nothing like this before.”
My older brother, Yarin, mustered two words: “My god.”
I texted Clara. It is difficult, knowing what we know now, to appreciate how long it took to comprehend the scope of the calamity. But looking back a year later, the dominant notes that emerge from our texts that morning are horror and confusion, but above all, shock.
“Really bad things are happening in Israel right now,” I wrote. “I’ve seen videos I wish I hadn’t. 40+ dead and who knows how many captured. It’s really, really bad.
“I know, amor. I woke up to the news.”
“Just wanted to make sure you knew. Nothing like this has happened before. Ever. It’s an ongoing nightmare. Unthinkable.”
“I know it’s awful ‘timing’ for us,” I wrote a few seconds later. “Just keep me posted on everything, OK? I need to make the mental switch out of all the horrible news from Israel.”
“Everything is going to be great,” I added. “Everything is going to be great.”
Oren Kessler and his wife, Clara, at their wedding in Central Park, NYC. (Photo credit: Stacie Stine)
“Thousands of rockets,” I wrote my family around 10:00. “Death toll now over 100, with some 800 injured. Awful videos of civilians, including women, being abducted. Not even clear how these 100+ people died. Hamas controlling several southern towns and villages. Nightmare.”
Nearly 12 hours passed before details started to emerge about the massacre at the Nova music festival.
“I have no clue how 100 people were killed,” I texted my friend Shachar, an Israeli living in Costa Rica, at 11:30. “Do you?”
“They were massacred. At a nature party,” she wrote. “There are over 2,000 dead from my understanding.”
“2,000???????” I wrote.
“Unconfirmed reports say 52 people—52 people!!—have been abducted to Gaza,” I tweeted at noon, 12 hours into the attack, undercounting the figure by four-fifths. “A disaster, a failure, a nightmare and a tragedy for Israel today.”
“The death toll in Israel is now at 200, and expected to rise,” I tweeted two hours later. “The vast majority of victims appear to have been gunned down, while a few were killed by rockets. A shocking day.”
That official count, we now know, was short by nearly 1,000.
Seven is a profoundly meaningful number in Jewish tradition: a seven-branch gold menorah stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. Every year pilgrims would bring the Seven Species of crops there as an offering, starting on the harvest festival of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover (a holiday of seven days) until the end of the harvest, Sukkot (likewise seven days). There are seven seas below and seven heavens above, and seven blessings for the bride and groom. just as God took seven days to create the world (resting on the last), he granted us another seven—in Hebrew, shiva—to grieve most deeply for those we have lost.
It was around 2:00 p.m. that I got a text from Nathaniel, a friend who is, like me, a Tel Aviv transplant from bucolic western New York.
“Don’t let anything stop your simcha!!!” he wrote. “From all my heart, we love you guys and wish you a special wedding.”
Perhaps that’s why we went through with it. Does one cancel a wedding over the murder of 40 people? What about 100? 200?
Besides, a wedding day is always frenzied. The night before, I had forced my father to show me his intended wardrobe; it was (forgive me, Dad) an abomination. I therefore tasked my brother with buying him a new shirt and tie the next morning, but my brother’s own dry cleaning was held up in Brooklyn and the job fell to me. Clara had hair and make-up appointments and college friends who had flown in to help. And it had been raining all day.
We both wanted a small, intimate ceremony with only our closest family. We settled on the great navel of the world—Central Park, New York City.
After the handful of texts that morning, Clara did not check her phone for the rest of the day. I did, but only intermittently. We would not speak to each other, and only barely texted, until we met under the chuppah. There was, as mentioned, a lot to do.
At 4 p.m. I made it to Central Park. Our preferred gazebo is classified as public property and therefore couldn’t be reserved. When I arrived, another wedding had just begun.
On to another gazebo, also taken, then a third one that was free. Finally, at the appointed hour, everything came together. The clouds cleared. Clara was even more radiant than usual.
It was, despite everything, a lovely and even joyous ceremony. Seven has special significance for us as well—we had been together for seven years, and seven family members stood with us under the wedding canopy. We’d printed cards with personalized versions of the seven blessings for each to read aloud—each one matched with the person for whom we believed it would be most meaningful.
We signed our Hebrew-Spanish ketubah. I smashed the glass.
We continued to dinner, raised a toast, found some joy and laughter, then back to the hotel to catch our breath.
And we went to sleep.
I awoke the next morning to a message from my father.
“Have you talked to anyone in Israel?”
“Just some mazel tovs from the cousins,” I messaged back.
He called me.
“Tomer,” he said softly.
“Tomer,” he said again, his voice cracking.
“Tomer was killed.”
Tomer, a commander in the elite Nahal reconnaissance unit, is my cousin Michal Shoham’s son. He was 23.
The Shohams live in Srigim, an idyllic village of 1,000 people southwest of Jerusalem. Michal and her husband Ran are longtime peaceniks, stalwarts of the anti-judicial overhaul protests. She is a family doctor, he’s an acupuncturist and practitioner of Eastern medicine. For years he drove Palestinian children to and from Israeli hospitals. Their youngest child is named Avshalom, “father of peace.”
Tomer’s temperament was sunny, his features set in a permanent grin. But he also had a very un-Israeli earnestness, a nearly American commitment to self-improvement and to the rules. Maybe it was his inheritance from the many yekkes, German-speaking Jews, that populate both main branches of his family tree.
Before the army he did a year’s national service at a boarding school for teenagers with criminal records. Once in uniform he earned five citations as an outstanding soldier and officer. He was the perennial winner of his unit’s speed races. He learned Arabic from a Druze soldier and planned to study philosophy after his release. After his death his parents found notebooks filled with “thoughts of the week”—points at which he feared he had fallen short over the week and where he might improve for the next one.
“Tomer always did things in a serious, thoughtful and thorough way,” Ran told Israeli media. “He was a person without malice. He was pure-hearted and kind.”
Tomer Shoham (Photo credit: Dror Farkash)
“He tried to instill real education and values within the army,” said his older sister Yael. “He wanted to grapple with complex moral questions.”
October 7 was to be his last day with his squad—they were nearing the end of their service and he was tapped for yet another command promotion. As a parting gift, he had bought each member a book on money management so they would not blow all their accumulated army wages on their inevitable post-release trip abroad.
It was only weeks later that we learned the circumstances of Tomer’s death.
Just 600 troops were guarding the Gaza border that morning. Among them was his squad of eight, manning an outpost next to the Kerem Shalom crossing at the Strip’s southern tip. The crossing, named for a nearby kibbutz, is where Gilad Shalit was captured in 2006.
The squad rose, as always, before dawn. In typical fashion, Tomer had given standing orders to greet every sunrise in full battle gear. Even on relatively sleepy deployments like the Gaza border, where little was likely to happen.
The onslaught began at dawn. A blinding rocket barrage, then alerts of a break in the border fence. He ordered a soldier, Or Mizrahi, to stay at post and with the rest drove a mile to the breach.
There they spotted eight men in partial IDF uniform—army pants, civilian shirts—wielding unfamiliar weapons. “Those are terrorists,” he said. “Start shooting.”
They kept streaming in. Dozens and dozens, then hundreds. Tomer’s men killed many. But then they heard Arabic on their radio, and Tomer climbed a hill with the squad’s marksman for a better view. A minute later the marksman saw Tomer was unresponsive—a bullet had pierced his helmet.
With his usual meticulousness, Tomer had ensured that his troops had a full stock of ammunition—at least 1,000 bullets—allowing them to fight for five hours until reinforcements appeared at last.
October 7 was to be Tomer’s last day with his squad—they were nearing the end of their service and he was tapped for yet another command promotion.
“It was like in training—he was giving out orders and in complete control,” said Ran. “He didn’t seem panicked or scared, but calm. He knew what he had to do.”
His soldiers later found the body of Or Mizrahi.
“He told me he loved me the most in the world,” Or’s girlfriend Ossie said, “but he had to go and help civilians. We were still on video when suddenly he showed half his body and said, ‘Ossi, I’m dying.’ That’s how the call ended.” He was 21.
It was five days before Tomer could be buried. There were too many ongoing funerals, and battles, to gather the needed quorum of officers and troops for a dignified interment. One thousand people traveled to the tiny military section at Srigim cemetery, temporarily doubling the village population. His parents asked that no rifles be fired in the air.
“They say God takes the best among us, and Tomer embodied the best,” a comrade wrote. “The strongest, the fastest, the finest commander with a heart of gold. It was an honor for us to know him.”
In the early days of this year, Tomer’s parents received a letter from a kibbutznik at Kerem Shalom.
“Tomer and his comrades saved my life, the life of my husband, of my four children, including a 10-day-old baby, of my father and mother, my grandmother and brother,” she wrote. “I have no words to express my thanks. I just want you to know how much we cherish and are endlessly thankful for his dedication to defending our kibbutz. I just have no words.”
At Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, unlike almost every other village on the Gaza border, no civilians were killed and no one was taken hostage.
The Shohams live on Ha-Yekev (“Vineyard”) street, a short verdant road of maybe 20 homes.
A few houses down, at 17 Ha-Yekev, lives Ravit Berdichevsky, a 56-year-old fitness coach who has lived alone since her husband died in a motorcycle accident a few years ago. At the time she was profiled in Israeli media as a model of resilience; sports had helped her regain a sense of control after the shattering loss.
But after October 7 she took in twin 1-year-olds to her home. They are her grandchildren from her son Itay Berdichevsky and his wife Hadar, who were slaughtered in their safe room at Kibbutz Kfar Aza as the infants looked on.
Itay’s younger brother served in the same battalion as Tomer, and Ravit sometimes drove them together to the train station to return to base. Each family, the Shohams and the Berdichevskys, came to the other’s shiva.
At the end of the street live the Louks—Nissim, his German-born wife Ricarda, and their children. The fate of their second daughter is now known around the world: Shani Louk’s body, partially clothed, in the back of a pickup truck with a gaping head wound and blood-matted hair, paraded through Gaza to exhilarated crowds invoking Allah and spitting on her corpse.
IDF troops recovered Shani’s desecrated remains in May, and she was buried in Srigim in the same cemetery where Tomer lies. The body of her boyfriend Orión Hernández Radoux—a citizen not of Israel but of Mexico and France—was recovered exactly a week later.
Erez Adar lived on Ha-Yekev until late 2022. His mother is Yaffa Adar, the white-haired octogenarian whose image, which showed her wrapped in a blanket on a terrorist’s golf cart, became one of the first emblems of the catastrophe. She was among the civilians released in the November prisoner exchange.
Erez’s nephew—Yaffa’s grandson—is Tamir Adar. For months he was thought to be among the hostages, but in January the army announced that he had been among the victims of October 7.
“In the village of Srigim,” said Tomer’s father Ran, “there is a small street that has suffered tremendous loss.”
We returned to Israel in April. I’m mulling ideas for a possible second book; Clara started work at a sustainability-oriented NGO.
Life goes on for Tomer’s family, as it must. Michal and Ran are back to work—she nearly full-time, he less. Yael has decamped for Montreal, where her fiancé—they just got engaged—will further his legal studies (he hopes to be a judge).
Avshalom, now 18, has just begun his national service with at-risk youth, just as Tomer did. Next year he will join the army; he had hoped to enlist in the Nahal reconnaissance unit, just as Tomer had done. But when a soldier is killed, the army requires parental signatures for any sibling wishing to join a combat unit. Michal and Ran will not be signing.
Srigim sits in the ancient borderland between Israel and her forever-foes, the Philistines. Several times I have climbed with Tomer’s parents up the path at nearby Tel Azekah, lined with stones inscribed with words from First Samuel recounting David’s slaying of Goliath in the Valley of Elah below.
But to me, the battle of Tomer and his comrades evokes a later clash with the Philistines—in Second Samuel—this one not triumphant but ruinous: of Israel’s first king, Saul, and David’s beloved friend Jonathan in the hills of Gilboa.
David laments them thus:
“The beauty of Israel is slain on your high places!
How the mighty have fallen!”
The warrior-poet and future king rages at the thought of Israel’s enemies gloating over her lifeless bodies. Naming two cities of the Philistine Pentapolis (Gaza was another), he wails:
“Tell it not in Gath,
Proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon—
Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice…”
“Beloved and pleasant in their lives,
And in their death they were not divided;
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions…
How the mighty have fallen!”
Ech naflu giborim.
King James’s scribes needed five words to convey what Hebrew’s concision transmits in three. The last word they translated as “mighty,” but I would have chosen another, equally faithful, rendering: heroes.
The Talmud teaches that when a funeral and a wedding procession meet at a crossroads, the wedding has the right to walk ahead. That even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we must fix our eyes upon Eretz ha-Chayim, the Land of the Living.
On October 7, as we celebrate our first wedding anniversary, we are choosing life. We are walking ahead.
Oren Kessler is author of Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, winner of the 2024 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Very sad, but inspiring.
Beautiful and profoundly sad.