A table covered with a cloth with the Loyola Marymount Hillel logo on the front, and on it sit six portraits of dead hostages.

Jason DeRose/NPR

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Jason DeRose/NPR

On the table outside Rabbi Zachary Zysman’s office at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, six portraits of hostages murdered by Hamas are weighed down by a small stone, placed there as an act of remembrance.

Nearby, a stack of brochures for a Krav Maga self-defense class leans against a notebook for people to write prayers that will eventually be tucked into the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Zysman, the chaplain for Jewish life at Loyola Marymount, has been carefully preparing for the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset on Wednesday, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, later this month. The anniversary of October 7, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, falls in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days.

Regardless of when the one-year anniversary fell, it would have been difficult, but Zysman said it is particularly poignant “at a time when we are thinking about conversion, renewal and hope.”

His flock is small but close-knit. Loyola Marymount is a Jesuit university with approximately 10,000 students, 375 of whom are Jewish.

“One of the messages I have repeated over and over again to my students is: What is our responsibility to each other?”

‘Who will live?’ sounds different in the aftermath of October 7

Along with other chaplains on campus, Zysman has organized speaker series, workshops and roundtable discussions on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia over the past year, but the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will be less about education and more about personal and communal religious devotion. for students.

The motif of death is common during the liturgies of the High Holy Days, and Zysman said the phrases: ‘Who will live? and ‘Who will die?’ will have a deeper resonance this year.

More than 1,200 Israelis, not all of whom were Jewish, were killed in the October 7 Hamas attacks, and according to the Israeli government, 100 Israelis are still being held hostage by Hamas. According to Palestinian health authorities, more than 41,500 people in Gaza were killed in the Israeli bombardment that followed.

Loyola Marymount senior Maya Golban says she has thought about the lives — and deaths — of so many people since Oct. 7.

“I personally cannot change the politics of the Middle East, but what I can do is honor the people who lost their lives.”

Golban said she has become significantly more active in Jewish groups on campus over the past year, sometimes feeling defensive and having to repeatedly justify her beliefs.

As she enters the High Holy Days, she said she continues to pray for “the peace and security of everyone in the region: Israelis, Palestinians and Bedouins.”

Students focus on intense spiritual preparation

In the weeks leading up to the High Holy Days, Rabbi Jocee Hudson taught a lunch class on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the rabbi of the Hillel Jewish Center, just across the street.

“Welcome everyone. Let’s put our feet on the ground,” Hudson said as students finished the vegan enchiladas Hillel offered, while others snuck in at the last minute. “As we gather, the question for today is, ‘What’s on your heart?’”

Hudson opened the class by leading the group of about ten people through a centering exercise.

“We root ourselves in presence.” she said, “We’re rooting ourselves here right now. As we say: the blessing for Torah study.”

Together the class recited the Hebrew prayer that translates: “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who sanctifies us and commands us to study the words of the Torah.”

Among those taking this course is senior Dylan Julia Cooper.

“Right in the aftermath of October 7,” she said, “we had a memorial on campus, which was so beautiful. And it was also very difficult because people came to protest. And it was very difficult in my grief to hold my crying friends in my arms and know that people were protesting twenty feet away.

Cooper, who studies anthropology and theater, said it has been a year of perseverance and that Oct. 7, in the middle of the High Holy Days, “serves as a reminder of how much we can endure as a community, as a universe.”

Cooper said he has used the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah to figure out how to let go of his disillusionment with the protests.

“My Jewish friends, my Muslim friends, my Palestinian friends, my Israeli friends,” says Cooper, “I want them all to feel supported and loved by me. And I don’t think holding on to my anger or holding a grudge is a good way to do that.

Next to Cooper in the class was Matan Marder Friedgood, a junior at USC. He described the past year as one on edge.

“I have a friend who is not Jewish and who is taking a course in Jewish studies,” he said. “She says, ‘Oh, Matan, you’re Jewish!’ And I feel tense. I think, ‘What is this about? What’s going to happen?”

But in this story it appears that he was more worried than necessary.

“She says, ‘What is a Shabbat morning service?’ It is the kindest question,” he said. “That was the year in a nutshell: ‘You are Jewish.’ Uh oh.”

But for Marder Friedgood, that intensity meant the discovery of something about himself that he finds surprising.

“My bond with Judaism has become stronger,” he said, “because of the pressure put on it. And my bond with other Jews has become stronger because of the pressure. And I’m much more willing to embrace it publicly.

Students seek opportunities for ‘Jewish joy’

Marder Friedgood wonders how he and his community can put aside the fear and anxiety of the past year and welcome the Jewish New Year with joy.

“How do we bring back Jewish joy?” he wondered. “How can we reintegrate all the positive things – all the things it means to be Jewish, all the wonderful things, all the reasons we love them – while at the same time holding on to the grief and sadness?”

These are questions that many Jews ask themselves in the run-up to both the High Holy Days and the October 7 anniversary. These are questions without easy answers.

“It is only through experiences of very real sorrow that I have come to understand the capacity for very real joy,” said Hillel Rabbi Jocee Hudson. “It comes in the context of the time, post-October 7, where all of us in the Jewish community have experienced deep fear.”

“As we have seen tens of thousands of Palestinians killed as well, we are in constant fear,” she said. “And there are students who have profound reactions to that – deep moral outrage.”

That outrage is also why preparations for this year’s High Holy Days have been so intense.

“When our hearts are broken open by grief,” Hudson said, “there are two choices: one is to withdraw. The other reaches out. And that is the spiritual work.”

It is spiritual work that demands a lot from 19, 20 or 21 year olds. But it is spiritual work that university student Matan Marder Friedgood wants to help his community do together, even on October 7 itself. He and a roommate are planning a vigil on the University of Southern California campus that day.

“We are both musicians and so we try to expand the space by creating – I think we have a ten-piece band to play Israeli and Jewish music – an atmosphere that holds all the sadness and holds all the sadness. and all the anger. And we look to the future.”

It is a future – a new year – marked by the hope of peace rather than the carnage of war. Marder Friedgood plans to end the vigil by teaching attendees to sing a prayer for peace in Hebrew.

It is the closing line of the medieval prayer known as the Kaddish. One translation reads: “He who makes peace in heaven – may He make peace for us and for all the people of Israel. Let us say, ‘Amen.’”