It will soon be 600 days since the horrors of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel, murdering over 1,200 innocent people and abducting 251 others into Gaza. Six hundred days.
For many, the physical wounds have begun to heal. But for the families of the hostages, and for the Jewish people, the pain only deepens. The moral wound of their absence remains unhealed, festering in the world’s silence.
Fifty-eight hostages are still in Gaza. Some are alive. Many are not. All are being held by a terror regime that violates the laws of war, scorns human decency, and glorifies death. Hamas continues to find apologists across the political spectrum, in the US and beyond.
These nearly 600 days have tested not only the resilience of Israel but the conscience of the free world.
Where are the institutions that claim to stand for human rights? Where is the sustained moral outrage? Why has the demand for their release not echoed from every capital, every campus, every pulpit?
We continue to say their names. We remember their faces. We refuse to move on.
And then last Wednesday night, that absence was joined by two more.
Two young Israeli embassy employees, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were gunned down in cold blood at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.
This was not a random shooting. It was an act of antisemitic terror, carried out at a Jewish institution, on a day meant to celebrate Jewish life in America. The motive is clear. The message is chilling.
The same hatred that abducted children and burned families alive in southern Israel pulled the trigger in our nation’s capital.
We grieve for Sarah and Yaron. Their memory now echoes alongside the hostages, the murdered, the silenced.
A call to action
In the darkness, we cling to the light of Edan Alexander’s return, an Israeli-American IDF soldier held by Hamas for over 19 months. His homecoming is a reminder that redemption is possible. But it is also a stark call to action: so many others remain.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations stands in unshakable solidarity with the families of the hostages, with the families of Sarah and Yaron, and with the people and government of Israel.
We reaffirm our commitment:
To bring every last hostage home.
To fight the rising tide of antisemitic violence.
To speak truth in a time of dangerous equivocation.
Six hundred days is an eternity.
Six hundred days is a moral indictment.
Six hundred days must not become six hundred and one.
Bring them home – now.
The writer is the chief executive officer of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the central coordinating body representing 50 diverse national Jewish organizations on issues of national and international concern. Follow him on X at @daroff.