Swords of Iron War Memorial Day: Mourning the Fallen of Simchat Torah 5784

How the day was established

On 17 March 2024 the Israeli government unanimously approved an annual national day of remembrance for the 7 October attack and the war that followed. It was not the first proposal: soon after the attack, members of the Knesset from both the coalition and the opposition had introduced bills for a memorial day.¹

The government chose the Hebrew date, 24 Tishrei, rather than 7 October. The attack fell on 22 Tishrei, which in Israel is Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Outside Israel, Simchat Torah falls on 23 Tishrei, so the first day free of festival in every Jewish community is the 24th. The decision also provided that when 24 Tishrei falls on Shabbat, as it did in the first year, the ceremonies are held on Sunday. For the first anniversary only, an additional state ceremony was held on 7 October 2024, since that Gregorian date had become, in the government’s words, etched in the consciousness of Israel and the world.²

The choice of a Hebrew date was debated. Some argued that 7 October is the date everyone remembers; others, especially among religious Israelis and some bereaved families, wanted the day tied to the Jewish calendar and to Simchat Torah. Since then, many Israelis observe both: the state day on 24 Tishrei, and gatherings on 7 October, including a large ceremony organized by bereaved families.³

In July 2026 the Knesset passed a law for the commemoration of the massacre and of heroism on Simchat Torah, 7 October, giving the memorial day the force of statute. The law fixes the day on 24 Tishrei and provides for state ceremonies, flags at half-mast at state institutions and military bases, broadcasting suited to the character of the day, and educational programs. It also creates a public authority for commemoration and calls for a national memorial site and museum in the western Negev, where the attack took place.⁴

What the day remembers

The day remembers three groups of people, whose stories are bound together.

The murdered of 7 October. Early that morning, during the holiday, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists broke through the Gaza border and attacked army posts, towns, kibbutzim, and an outdoor music festival. About 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians: elderly people, parents, children and babies, young people at the festival, foreign workers, Jews and Arabs, among them Bedouin. It was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.⁵

The captives. About 251 people were taken into Gaza as hostages. Some were released or rescued over the following two years, some came home only in coffins, and some were killed in captivity. The remains of the last hostage held in Gaza were brought home in January 2026.⁶ The day remembers those who died in captivity, and it holds before Israel the ongoing suffering of those who came back and of their families.

The fallen of the war. In the war that followed, on several fronts, soldiers, reservists, police officers, members of the security services, and local volunteers fell defending Israel. Their number is well over a thousand.⁷ Behind every one of these numbers stands a family: parents, widows and widowers, orphans, brothers and sisters.

These figures are approximate; they were revised many times, and they cannot express what each life was. Jewish tradition says that whoever destroys a single soul is as if he destroyed a whole world.⁸

How the day is kept in Israel

The day is a memorial day, not a festival and not a fast. Businesses and schools are generally open. The President of Israel has opened the day by lowering the flag at his residence to half-mast at 6:29 in the morning, the minute the attack began. On Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, two central state ceremonies are held: one led by the Ministry of Defense for the fallen of the security forces, and one at the monument for the victims of hostile acts, for the civilians who were murdered. Communities in the south hold their own ceremonies, and schools teach about the day.⁹

The prayers at these ceremonies are those of every Israeli memorial: Psalms, Yizkor, the memorial prayer Kel Malei Rachamim, and the Kaddish.

The heaviness of the date

For Jews, the date itself carries a special pain. Simchat Torah is the day of greatest joy in the Jewish year, when the reading of the Torah is completed and begun again, and the scrolls are carried in circles while the congregation sings and dances (see Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah). On that day in 5784, synagogues in Israel heard the sirens during their prayers, and many communities outside Israel learned the news during their own festival. Ever since, joy and grief have been bound together on these days. Many communities now remember the murdered and the captives during their Simchat Torah celebrations, and many feel that they dance with tears.

The Jewish calendar has long held joy and mourning side by side. The Tanakh records that on the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month, after the joy of Sukkot, the people of Israel assembled “with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth upon them” to confess their sins and to cry out to Hashem (Nehemiah 9:1).

The Scriptures of mourning

Psalm 79: the cry over the slain

Psalm 79 was written over a disaster in Jerusalem, and Jews have prayed it after massacres ever since.

Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.

The psalm does not only lament; it confesses, asking God to “purge away our sins, for your name’s sake” (79:9). And it prays for captives in words that fit the hostages exactly:

Let the sighing of the prisoner come before you; according to the greatness of your power preserve you those that are appointed to die.

Psalm 83: when they say “let Israel be no more”

Psalm 83 is a prayer when Israel is surrounded by enemies who say, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance” (83:4). It begins, “Keep not you silence, O God” (83:1). It is right to pray it on this day. But we should notice where it ends: the psalmist asks that the enemies be put to shame “that they may seek your name, O Hashem” (83:16), and that all men “may know that you, whose name alone is Hashem, are the most high over all the earth” (83:18). The prayer is for Hashem’s justice and the knowledge of His name, not for private vengeance.

Psalm 121: the Keeper of Israel

Behold, he that keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

Many Israelis prayed this psalm for soldiers and captives. It is not a promise that no harm will come; on 7 October harm came. It is a promise that Hashem has not stopped watching over Israel, “from this time forth, and even for evermore” (121:8).

David’s lament for Shaul and Yonatan

When David heard that King Shaul and his son Yonatan had fallen in battle, he did not hurry past his grief. He tore his garments, wept, fasted, and composed a lament, and he commanded that it be taught to the people (2 Samuel 1:11–12, 17–18).

The beauty of Israel is slain upon your high places: how are the mighty fallen!

David mourned for Shaul, who had pursued him, as well as for Yonatan, whom he loved: “they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided” (1:23). His lament is the Bible’s model for mourning the fallen: honest, personal, and public.

Lamentations and Rachel’s tears

The book of Lamentations gives permission to weep: “For these things I weep; my eye, my eye runs down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me” (Lamentations 1:16). At its centre stands the hope that Israel has clung to in every catastrophe: “It is of Hashem’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning” (3:22–23). “For though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies” (3:32).

And in Jeremiah, the mother of Israel weeps for her children taken away:

A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. Thus says Hashem; Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears: for your work shall be rewarded, says Hashem; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy.

Jeremiah wrote of exiles carried away by an enemy; Israel heard these words again in the long months when its sons and daughters were held in Gaza. “And there is hope in your end, says Hashem, that your children shall come again to their own border” (31:17).

The prayers of Israel

Kel Malei Rachamim (אל מלא רחמים), “God, full of compassion”, is the memorial prayer chanted at funerals, at the graveside, on Yizkor days, and at every Israeli memorial ceremony. It asks that the soul of the departed find “proper rest under the wings of the Divine Presence”. Its familiar form spread among Ashkenazi Jews in the early modern period, and Israel uses special versions, such as the one recited for fallen soldiers of the IDF.¹⁰

The Kaddish (קדיש) is recited by mourners at every service. It does not mention death at all. In Aramaic, it sanctifies God’s name: “Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He created according to His will; may He establish His kingdom in your lifetime.” To say it beside a grave is an act of faith: the mourner declares that God is still holy and His kingdom is still coming. Its hope is very close to the prayer Yeshua taught: “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:9–10).¹¹

Prayers for captives. Jewish tradition counts the redemption of captives among the greatest of the commandments; Rambam writes that there is no greater mitzvah.¹² An old prayer, Acheinu, is recited in many synagogues after the Torah reading: “Our brothers, the whole house of Israel, who are given over to distress and captivity… may the All-Present have mercy on them and bring them out from distress to relief.” During the war, communities around the world recited it daily.

Messianic reflection: weeping with those who weep

Paul wrote to the believers in Rome, many of them from the nations: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). In the same letter he wrote that Israel remains “beloved for the fathers’ sakes”, for “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (11:28–29). A follower of Yeshua, Jew or Gentile, cannot stand at a distance from Israel’s grief.

Yeshua said, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). He did not treat grief as a lack of faith. At the tomb of his friend El’azar (Lazarus), though he knew he was about to raise him, “Yeshua wept” (John 11:35). He also wept over Jerusalem, foreseeing the suffering coming upon it (Luke 19:41). The Messiah who wept teaches us to weep before the Father.

Paul also wrote that we “sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The Scriptures teach that the dead sleep until the resurrection (Daniel 12:2; John 11:11). The hope of the Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) is the hope of the Tanakh: that Hashem will raise the dead, judge in righteousness, and restore His people.

The hope the prophets give

The prophets speak of days when the nations gather against Jerusalem, and Hashem defends it. Zechariah writes, “I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about” (Zechariah 12:2), and “In that day shall Hashem defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (12:8). We read these as promises of Hashem’s faithfulness to Israel in the last days. We do not map them onto the news or treat any war as the fulfilment of a particular verse.

The deepest promise is not victory in war but the end of war and the end of death:

He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord Hashem will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth.

The Brit Hadashah takes up the same words: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (Revelation 21:4). The prophet Micah sees the nations coming up to the mountain of Hashem to learn His ways:

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.

A war called “Swords of Iron” is remembered by a people whose prophets long for the day when swords are beaten into plowshares. That longing is the hope of Israel, to be fulfilled when Mashiach reigns from Jerusalem.

Remembering the day

• Learn the names. Many of the murdered and fallen have memorial pages. Read a few names and stories, and remember them as people, not numbers.
• Pray the Psalms, especially Psalms 79, 83, 121, and 130, and pray for the bereaved families, the wounded in body and soul, the hostages who returned and their healing, and the soldiers who still serve.
• Light a memorial candle and, where there is a minyan, let the mourners say Kaddish and Kel Malei Rachamim.
• Comfort mourners you know; presence matters more than words.
• Give to organizations that care for bereaved families, the wounded, and the communities of the south.
• Pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6), and for the day when no one will make Israel afraid.

See our calendar for this year’s date.