It’s been a year since the black day that our fellow Jews in Israel were brutalized in ways so inhumane, so cruel, that the brain refuses to process the information, though we know all too well that it happened. Most of the hostages are still in Gaza, and many of them are corpses, awaiting a decent Jewish burial in Eretz Yisroel, their families, meanwhile, desperate for closure. The live captives are being held in unimaginable conditions, many in tunnels with little air, some of them lacking the space to sit or stand and often needing to take turns to lie flat to sleep. They don’t have toilets. They don’t have clean clothes. And we fear the worst regarding the young women held there by the terrorists, yemach shmam v’zichram.

Emboldened by the successes of Hamas, Hezbollah has attacked the north non-stop and nearly 100,000 Israelis were evacuated as a result, and cannot return home. Iran has attacked Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles, sending Israelis into their safe rooms twice, and even the Houtis have joined this unholy party, attacking Israel from Yemen. Too many brave Jewish soldiers have lost their lives fighting this war forced on our people, and we fear that Kamala Harris will win and continue the Biden policy of slow-walking arms to Israel—or worse yet, stop all arms and aid to our beleaguered Jewish brethren in Eretz HaKodesh.

All we can do now is pray that Donald Trump will be elected, so that things might take a better turn, that our hostages are returned, and that our Jewish boys and men will stop losing their lives in this war that was forced on our people.