Yom Kippur ritual of communal mourning takes on fresh meaning

(JTA) — In 2001, Yom Kippur fell on Sept. 26, two weeks after the terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. By then, the major denominations had already written special prayers to be said during Yizkor, a prayer service in memory of the dead. The Reform movement posted a prayer in the style of the liturgy said for Jewish “martyrs” and Holocaust victims during the traditional service. “Remember all those who were lost in the terror of that day,” it read. “Grant their families peace and comfort for Your name’s sake.” 

Yom Kippur begins this year on Oct. 11, four days after the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and once again rabbis and liturgists are trying to find ways to ritualize raw communal grief on the holy day. A number of groups have put out supplements to the High Holiday prayer book, known as the mahzor, containing reflections, prayers and whole services addressing the mourning and anguish around the day and subsequent 12 months of a crisis that shows few signs of fading. 

The entire cycle of this year’s High Holidays is haunted by Oct. 7, especially Simchat Torah, the season’s climax: Hamas breached Israel’s southern fence on the holiday last year, and congregations have been struggling with how to celebrate what is supposed to be a joyous holiday on what is essentially the yahrtzeit, or death anniversary, of some 1,200 victims of the attacks and the kidnapping of hundreds more.

But Yom Kippur too presents challenges after a traumatic year for Jews. The Yizkor service, said during various holidays throughout the year, is often seen as an opportunity for people to commune personally with their own close losses: a parent, a spouse, a child. How do you balance the personal nature of what is supposed to be a day of self-introspection with the communal grief over a devastating attack?

Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed said she had that balance — others might say contradiction — in mind when she wrote a ”Yizkor for the Victims Of October 7th” for the Conservative movement. 

“You never want to overshadow and make people feel like their personal loss is not being measured in the context of the communal struggles we have,” said Reiss Medwed, a teaching professor emerita of Northeastern University who this year is serving as interim vice provost academic affairs at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. And yet Yizkor, she added, “is not a static experience. It transforms itself over your lifetime and across your losses. And it can go from being anything from intensely dramatic and challenging to something that is a sweet opportunity to lovingly recall grandparents who passed at a ripe old age.”

Her five-page service includes a call-and-response catalog of victims of Oct. 7 — including “peace-loving youngsters” and “foreign workers” — that echoes the Eleh Ezkerah, or Martyrology, recited on Yom Kippur. There is a recitation of the kibbutzim and villages that were attacked and an adaptation of the traditional “El Maleh Rachamim” memorial prayer that refers to those who “were cruelly slaughtered on that fateful Simchat Torah.” 

Rabbi Joel Pitkowsky of Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey (where, full disclosure, I am a member), said he will use parts of Reiss Medwed’s liturgy on Yom Kippur. Pitkowsky also saw a challenge in observing Yom Kippur as a day of personal introspection and repentance,  and acknowledging “where we are as a Jewish people right now.” 

“How do I focus on making myself a better person — all of that work that goes into Yom Kippur,” he said, “and how do I hold on to the incredible, powerful, meaningful and unbelievably sad place where we find ourselves in Jewish history?”

The answer, he suggested, is found in the traditional Yom Kippur liturgy itself, where even personal sins are confessed in the third person, and historical tragedies are recalled in the Martyrology. “Judaism embraces the creative tension between the individual and the group,” he said.

Rabbi Naomi Levy, who wrote a Yizkor meditation for Oct. 7, doesn’t see balancing personal mourning and communal grief over the attacks and the war as a “challenge.” 

“It’s a responsibility,” said Levy, who leads the independent Nashuva congregation in Los Angeles. Mourning Oct. 7 “is something people are seeking and need.”

Services at Nashuva will include private time for worshipers to remember a loved one, followed by prayers for the victims of Oct. 7. 

The prayer she wrote asks God to remember the victims, and to give strength to those who mourn them. “God of the broken-hearted, God of the living, God of the dead, send comfort and strength to the grieving, send hope to the children, send healing to Israel,” it reads. 

Other supplements written for the first Yom Kippur Yizkor since the attacks hit similar notes, with perhaps different emphasis. Binyamin Holzman’s prayer for the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Ritual Center includes a reference to the biblical character Job, who prayed that the earth would not “cover his blood” and let the injustice of his suffering be forgotten. In a supplement from Svivah, the Jewish women’s empowerment group, Rabbi Melanie Levav writes that Yizkor is necessary because it gives words for mourning a tragedy like Oct. 7 for which “there are no words.”

At Beth David, a Reform congregation in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a Yom Kippur afternoon “Yizkor/Memorial Service for 10/7 Victims” will “shift from personal mourning to our communal mourning.”

And some groups will take the rituals of Yizkor to mark Oct. 7 to make a pointed political statement. A coalition of left-wing Jewish groups deeply critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza — including Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace — are holding “a mass public ritual of remembrance, refusal, and recommitment” in Brooklyn on Yom Kippur. “This Yom Kippur, let us turn our most holy of holy days into a mass mourning and collective atonement,” reads the announcement of the event, called “Yizkor.”  

Such politicization of Yizkor will be rare in U.S. synagogues, however. Rabbi Joel Levenson of Midway Jewish Center in Syosset, Long Island, is typical of many rabbis when he said he doesn’t think his congregants are coming to Yom Kippur services “for the political analysis.”

“As a rabbi I am looking to lead and speak to a congregation of 1,500 and illuminate the power of Torah, which has spoken to our people over our centuries,” he said. 

Levenson is adding an innovation to remember Oct. 7: Yizkor is also said on Shemini Atzeret, the penultimate holiday in the High Holiday cycle, and one that coincides with the celebration in Israel of Simchat Torah. Levenson said his synagogue will hold a special Yizkor service on the evening before, to emphasize the discord between the usually joyous holiday and the massacres that took place on it in 2023.

“That evening of Shemini Atzeret will be a space for traditional prayers of Yizkor, but more truly dedicated to a space within a ritual framework to remember and honor those who lost their lives,” he said.

And for his congregation, the anniversary is both communal and personal: Omer Neutra, who was taken hostage on Oct. 7 while serving as a tank commander near Gaza, grew up in the synagogue starting in pre-school.

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