‘It’s not over.’ One year later, Jews in Greater Boston reckon with the legacy of Oct. 7

But this year there was also a new thread laced through the speakers’ remarks, a sense that Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza it sparked have unsettled life for Jews here. Speaking from the steps, Eric Nelson, a Harvard government professor, said it was a small mercy that his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, had not lived long enough to see Oct. 7. He was grateful, he said, that he did not witness the day that Hamas militants and other terrorists killed more than 1,200 people, including families in their homes, burned kibbutzim, massacred revelers at a music festival, and took around 250 people of all ages as hostages.

Nelson was also glad, he said, that his grandfather did not witness “the shameful response to these horrors: the apologetics for barbarism pouring out of every corner of the world, the orgy of abuse and violence to which countless Jewish communities have been subjected to their neighbors, the legitimation in polite society of anti-Jewish libels… and, of course, the gaslighting pretense that none of this has anything to do with antisemitism.”

Since Oct. 7, many Jews and Jewish communities in Greater Boston have felt under pressure, contending with a new reality in which their identity feels persistently scrutinized, and as signs of resurgent antisemitism proliferate. Increasingly, Jewish families attend religious services or send their children to schools under the watch of private security following a rash of synagogue attacks several years ago and a sharp increase in bomb threats in the last year. As Israel has prosecuted a war against Hamas in Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 people and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe, cultural organizations and campus groups have made clear that Zionists — a label that surveys show applies to the great majority of American Jews — are not welcome. Now, many Boston-area Jews wonder if a decades-long age of assimilation and broad society acceptance is coming — or has come — to an end.

Jeffrey Bussgang, a 55-year-old venture capitalist, said that the past year has been the most unsettled period for American Jews in his lifetime. The age of acceptance — when forms of overt discrimination against Jews, such as university admissions quotas, faded away and when it was possible to move through the world, more or less, without thinking about one’s Jewish identity — had seemed to him like it “ “would never end in America.” Now, he said, “I’m not sure. And fluctuate between denial and resignation.”

The first anniversary of the attacks also prompted some in the Jewish community to pause in reflection, including nearly 4,000 people who attended an event at the Boch Center in Boston Monday night. “We are here for a peaceful resolution to the situation in Israel,” said Jeffrey Rosenspan, 42, of Walpole. “My family believes peace is the only solution, and we hope the hostages are returned right away.”

In recent weeks, the war has widened. Following a year of back-and-forth strikes across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, Israel escalated its fight with Hezbollah, and Hamas ally and fellow militia backed by Iran. The bombardment has killed more than 2,000 people, according to Lebanese officials. Israel has also traded strikes with the Houthis, another Iran-backed militia in Yemen. And last week it fended off a barrage of ballistic missiles fired at the country by Iran.

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators gathered near the Charles River to protest against Israel. As they marched down Storrow Drive, they chanted “Globalize the intifada.”

Some pro-Palestinian activists say intifada chants are a call for Palestinian liberation. But many Jews hear something else. “It means to get rid of all the Jews,” said Claudia Kreiman, senior rabbi at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline. “It means to use terrorism as a tool.”

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intifada, which means uprising in Arabic, is usually a reference to two violent conflicts that began in the 1980s and the early 2000s. The second intifada included suicide bombings and mass shootings of Israeli civilians, as well as deadly crackdowns against Palestinians by Israeli forces. Some pro-Palestinian groups in the United States hailed the Hamas attack last year as the beginning of a new intifada.

Rabbi Kreiman is not given to fiery rhetoric. She is, aside from being a religious leader, a human rights activist who has protested against the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. She wants ceasefires to end the multi-front war.

But she has a red line. A Chilean, American, and Israeli citizen, Kreiman lost her mother in a 1994 bombing said to have been organized by Hezbollah militants of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. “No terrorism is acceptable,” she said. “It cannot be excused.”

And yet she, like many Jews, believes that is precisely what some Americans have done since Oct. 7. “It’s been very hard to hear and see those who in the name of human rights and in the name of social justice and in the name of liberation have excused the terrorist attacks of Hamas,” she said.

Jeremy Burton, the head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, put it more starkly. “People were marching down Storrow Drive holding signs calling for the murder of Jews everywhere,” he said, referring to signs that said “One Solution: Intifada! Revolution!”

“There are a lot of public leaders in this town who are going to look the other way and not condemn it,” he said.

As the war has continued, painful fissures have opened up within the Jewish community. There have been splits between parents and children and within groups of friends. Some who oppose Zionism or are sharply critical of Israel feel unwelcome in Jewish spaces where they once belonged.

“We’re working hard to hold our community together,” said Rabbi Andy Vogel of Temple Sinai in Brookline. “We’ve got people in the room who are in vastly different places.”

Alex Bernat, a senior at Harvard University, said he feels like he lost a year of his college experience as, he contends, his campus became inhospitable to Jews, especially those who would not disavow Israel or Zionism, the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It began when more than 30 student groups signed a letter on Oct. 7 saying that Israel was “the only one to blame” for the unfolding violence.

During the encampment that Harvard protesters created in the spring, Bernat said that “eliminationist” rhetoric about Israel was prevalent. Some signs, he recalled, said, “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab,” referring to the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, which border Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. “If Palestine is Arab from the water to the water, what happens to all the Jews there?” he said.

Tonya Alanez of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

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Mike Damiano can be reached at [email protected].