The Children Taken from Us - Gavriella Remembered (Yom HaShoah 2025)

Tonight is one of the hardest days in the year for Israelis...the others come in a week from now. Tonight, we mourn the senseless, cruel, barbaric, systematic murder of over 1.5 million Jews, among more than 6 million Jews. 80 years and we still can't tell you the full number. Whole families were wiped out, generations annihilated.

You probably expect me to say something about October 7 but I don't need to. The knowledge that never again was a lie is something we all know. Perhaps one day we will put these great tragedies together, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime. Each carried its horrors and each will be remembered every year and on the days we will eventually dedicate to it.

For now, as we still pray for the remaining 59 hostages, every day is October 7 and so tonight and tomorrow will be both October 7 and Yom HaShoah...Holocaust Remembrance Day.

As I do each year, I will start by remembering a child...and as I cry for Gavriella, I will cry for Kfir and Ariel Bibas and all the children we lost on October 7.

Gavriella was 11 when she was taken and murdered by the Nazis. As most children would, when separated from her parents and told to go with her older sisters, she wanted her mother. My husband's future grandmother, a woman he would never meet, tried to push her younger daughter to join her sisters but Gavriella would have nothing of it. The Nazis noticed and ordered the child to remain with her mother...in the death line of Auschwitz.

What horrors she knew in her final moments, we'll never know. As we will never fully know the horrors and pain of the murdered children of October 7.

Tonight, I will light a candle or millions of Jews...and over 1,200 and Kfir and Ariel and Gavriella and 1.5 million Jewish children slaughtered for the simple reason that they were...what I am, what my children and grandchildren are.

We are Jews. We are the people of Israel. In happiness and joy and the sunshine of our homeland and in the pain and sadness and darkness thrust upon us by those who hate.

Gavriella, you live in our hearts. In my beautiful granddaughter who carries your name and is 11 years old. You were not given the chance to grow, to love, to have children and see your own daughter at 11 but I hope you see the child who carries your name.

She is proud and strong and beautiful. Fluent in Hebrew, her mother-tongue and English. She grows in sunshine and love as you were meant to.

May your memory always be for a blessing, beautiful Gavriella. I wish we could have known you personally. You would be in your late 80s with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to bring you joy but for the hate and the plans of a madman and a world who chose silence. A world that could have saved you and didn't.