A survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel shared her story with the entire student body at a Manhattan school on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n
Jewish students at Stuyvesant High School organized the event as part of a larger movement to strengthen Jewish pride and encourage dialogue.<\/p>\n
Event organized by school’s Jewish Student Union<\/p>\n
Nearly 200 students, faculty and parents were in attendance, and for many, it was their first time hearing from a survivor of the massacre.<\/p>\n
Oriya Ness Berlin, 21, was an unarmed Israel Defense Forces observer in Re’im at the time. She said 60 terrorists infiltrated, and she hid in a safe room as she heard her peers getting murdered in another room nearby. She was one of only a few survivors.<\/p>\n
“And then just the craziest amount of shots I’ve ever heard and then complete silence,” she told the audience.<\/p>\n
Stuyvesant High junior Jonathan Tetry and his peers organized the event.<\/p>\n
Tetry is the president of the Jewish Student Union, which falls under the nonprofit National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), an international youth organization that empowers Jewish teens.<\/p>\n
“I went to the Nova [music festival] site. I saw all the markers for all the young people, like not that far from our age, that died there,” Tetry said. “A lot of people completely ignore everything I’m saying.”<\/p>\n
He said instead of turning to social media to learn about Oct. 7, he hoped his peers could turn to each other after hearing a firsthand account.<\/p>\n
Club hopes to create dialogue between Jewish, non-Jewish students<\/p>\n
“Our group decided that it would be a very fitting time to host a survivor of Oct. 7, specifically on the day before Yom Kippur begins,” said Rabbi Efraim Tepler, the advisor to the school’s Jewish Student Union. “We remember those who have fallen.”<\/p>\n
Part of the club’s purpose is to create dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish students.<\/p>\n
“I felt like the event was really informative, and it was very powerful to get a firsthand account of what happened,” junior Helios Peng said.<\/p>\n
“The thing that sparked this war was this horrible atrocity, so I hope that they actually get to learn that and understand that,” Tetry said.<\/p>\n
The group hopes this was the first step of many at the school to honor the lives lost on Oct. 7, and build connections instead of breaking them down.<\/p>\n