ATLANTA — A group of Atlanta Jewish leaders, including 15 rabbis and seven others, recently traveled to Israel and visited the sites of the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed around 1,200 people and led to 243 others being taken hostage in Gaza.
Right now, 132 men, women and children are still being held captive.
11Alive talked with Eric Robbins, who is the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta about the trip.
The group, Robbins said, visited a kibbutz -- a small commune village, many of which dot southern Israel -- during their trip. He shared pictures of homes with bullet holes in walls and markings from where people checked the homes after the attack.
He touched on the experiences of people who were inside their homes at the time of the attack.
"There's nobody in that country that wasn't affected, whether it's someone they know who's still held hostage, or they lost somebody in that day, or since then they've lost a family member in the army," he said.
Robbins further described that outside of the homes you can see banners hanging up, sharing what happened to the people who lived inside. A woman told Robbins' group that when you walk in to one of the homes, you can still see the grenade and remnants from where it exploded inside.
The group of Atlanta Jewish leaders also visited the site of the Supernova Music Festival, where more than 360 of the 1,200 people killed on October 7 died. Robbins compared the music festival to Atlanta's annual Music Midtown. He said that visiting the aftermath of the Supernova Music Festival would be similar to going to Piedmont Park after Music Midtown and seeing posters with the faces of hundreds of people who were killed or kidnapped.
"People that know them have come and left things that have belonged to them, or photographs of them with other people or poems that they've written, or flowers that they've put down, or rocks that they've painted and there's hundreds of them," Robbins said.
Right now, Robbins said the Israeli people are traumatized from what happened on October 7. However, he said during his visit he felt a resiliency from the people there.
Also during the trip, Robbins said they talked with people with a broad spectrum of views on both October 7 and the current Israel-Hamas War.
He said they talked with Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, a Palestinian who lives in the West Bank as well as a settler in the West Bank. All of the people they spoke to had a different perspective on Israel's response to the October 7 Hamas attack, he said.
He added he wanted to make sure he was clear about making a distinction between Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, and the Palestinian people.
"This is a very complex situation that requires understanding it from multiple perspectives before I think you can really take a solid position or put anybody in a box," Robbins said. "Anyone who wants to take a position really has to do -- similar to what we did -- which is to understand this thing from all perspectives and not jump to conclusions, not try to fit this in to a right, wrong dichotomy. It’s just not that simple."
Israel was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust to protect the Jewish people from attacks like the one committed by Hamas, Robbins said, arguing that context needs to be considered when talking about Israel's current response in Gaza.
"This is a response of Israel to their families being decimated," he said. "They also need to feel that they are safe and they need to feel whatever it is that basically attacked them and killed them and destroyed their families, they need to do something about it so that it doesn't happen again."
While in Israel, the group also visited the grave of 20-year-old Rose Lubin, who grew up in Dunwoody, Georgia. She died in a stabbing attack back in November while serving as a sergeant with the Israeli Defense Force.
Robbins, along with the other Atlanta leaders who went with him to Israel, will be holding a community forum in Sandy Springs on Sunday, February 18. It will be from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. at Or Hadash, which is located at 7460 Trowbridge Road in Sandy Springs.
The group will share more about their trip as well as insights from what they saw and answer questions from the community.
Additionally, on Sunday, February 18, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival will be showing a documentary about the massacre at the Supernova Music Festival titled "Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre." Screenings will be held at the Tara Theatre at 1:20 p.m. and then later that night at 8:00 p.m. at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse.
