🆕 A Prayer for October 7, Three Years Later — by Rabbi Menachem Creditor

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7 October 2026 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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2023-2025 Israel–Hamas war, English vernacular prayer, הזכרת נשמות hazkarat neshamot

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	Healer of Shattered Souls, we ask that You notice us and all those who have promised to bear testimony to unspeakable horrors.
	The indelible marks with which these images and sounds have scarred us to our cores are permanent. We will never unsee nor unhear any of what we saw, felt, experienced. We accept this terrible imperative.
	We bear witness to honor the dead Women Men Boys Girls Grandmothers Grandfathers Whole families Babies whose bodies were violated whose very humanity was denied.
	We affirm, through this sacred witnessing, that they were in fact human beings, created in Your Image, worthy of infinite dignity.
	We affirm, through the three years since That Day, the weight of it all upon Survivors upon bereft families upon kibbutzim and towns upon Medinat Yisrael and Am Yisrael upon us all.
	Yes, we have proven our capacities for healing for rebuilding for loving. But today we call out against the terrible reality that tested us in the first place.
	God, Who has Witnessed all of this for all time, we beg You send Divine Warmth to reanimate us when our eyes are full of this darkness, to somehow reinflate our souls when breathing feels labored, or even wrong.
	Remind us to fight for joy, for that is what the souls we remember today deserved, what those who were trapped underground we tenderly hold today always deserved, what the Jewish People deserves, what every human being deserves.
	May the memories of our martyrs be forever blessed. May Am Yisrael, the Jewish People, heal and rebuild and find heart once again.

“A Prayer for October 7, Three Years Later” by Rabbi Menachem Creditor was shared by the author through the Open Siddur Project Discussion Group on Facebook, 7 October 2026.

Menachem Creditor

Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar in Residence at UJA-Federation New York and was the founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence. A frequent speaker in communities and campuses around the United States and Israel with over 1 million views of his online videos and essays, he was named by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America. His 22 books and 6 albums of original music include the global anthem "Olam Chesed Yibaneh" and the anthologies When We Turned Within and None Shall Make Them Afraid. He has been involved in the leadership of American Jewish World Service, AIPAC, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the One America Movement, an organization dedicated to bringing together Americans of different faiths and opinions. He and his wife Neshama Carlebach live in New York, where they are raising their five children.

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handmade red ceramic anemones (kalaniot) placed as a memorial at the Nova Festival Memorial Site in southern Israel (kissmy_art 2025)

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." (Psalms 90:17)

🆕 A Prayer for October 7, Three Years Later — by Rabbi Menachem Creditor

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