This article was updated on Oct. 17 at 2:35 p.m.
Rye residents Todd and Lisa Kantor were just starting a vacation in Jerusalem on Oct. 7 last year when an announcement in Hebrew sent people scurrying past them through the hotel hallways.
“Do you speak Hebrew?” Todd Kantor recalled someone asking him. “We don’t,” he replied. A person explained in English that they had to get to a bomb shelter, because Israel was under attack.
During a memorial service at Community Synagogue to commemorate the one-year anniversary of that attack, Kantor recalled the harrowing moments that he, his wife, and their three sons spent in the shelter.
Nearly 250 people attending the service sat rapt as he spoke. Four more times that day, the Kantors would head toward the bomb shelter before deciding they had to get on a flight home. They then had to take an hour-long drive through the desert to get to the airport, wondering if they would have to lie down in the sand under more attacks. They did not.
But Kantor knows they were lucky that day, unlike the more than 1,200 men, women, and children murdered by Hamas terrorists and the 254 taken hostage. One hundred hostages remain captive today.
It has been one year since the attack, and the politics around that day have turned heated, as critics assail Israel for its retaliatory strikes in Gaza, where, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 40,000 people have died. Israel has now responded to rocket attacks by Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon with missile attacks and a ground assault, ensuring that this year-old conflict will not have a quick end.
At the synagogue, Rabbi Daniel Gropper led a service that included Kantor’s comments as well an account from Noya Opher, an Israeli who is spending a year of service in Westchester.
She called Oct. 7 “a nightmare that we could never imagine.” She was trapped for two days in a bomb shelter and spoke of friends and relatives lost in the violence.
One of her cousins was taken hostage. “In October 2023, I hung a picture of her in my room and said I will take it down when she returns,” she said. “The picture still hangs in my room.”
Rye Brook resident Jaycee Taub tearfully read the words spoken by the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin at his funeral. He was an American and one of the hostages captured and eventually killed by Hamas.
Gropper and Cantor Melanie Cooperman offered prayers in Hebrew and in English and at one point invited participants to place on a table at the front of the sanctuary the smooth black rocks they had been given upon entering the service. As mourners lined up, the pile of rocks grew, a physical representation of those who had come to honor the dead.
Gropper also unveiled a plaque that honors “our brothers and sisters” who died on Oct. 7 on the synagogue’s memorial wall.
Rye Mayor Josh Cohn, State Assemblyman Steve Otis, Rye Town Supervisor Gary Zuckerman, Rye City Council members William Henderson, Jamie Jensen, and Sara Goddard, and Rye Schools Superintendent Eric Byrne attended the service. Local clergy, including Father Epy from Church of the Resurrection and Ryan Zavacky of Christ’s Church in Rye, also attended.