Survivor of Oct. 7 attack in Israel shares story with NYC high school students
A survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel shared her story with the entire student body at a Manhattan school on Tuesday afternoon.
Jewish students at Stuyvesant High School organized the event as part of a larger movement to strengthen Jewish pride and encourage dialogue.
Event organized by school's Jewish Student Union
Nearly 200 students, faculty and parents were in attendance, and for many, it was their first time hearing from a survivor of the massacre.
Oriya Ness Berlin, 21, was an unarmed Israel Defense Forces observer in Re'im at the time. She said 60 terrorists infiltrated, and she hid in a safe room as she heard her peers getting murdered in another room nearby. She was one of only a few survivors.
"And then just the craziest amount of shots I've ever heard and then complete silence," she told the audience.
Stuyvesant High junior Jonathan Tetry and his peers organized the event.
Tetry is the president of the Jewish Student Union, which falls under the nonprofit National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), an international youth organization that empowers Jewish teens.
"I went to the Nova [music festival] site. I saw all the markers for all the young people, like not that far from our age, that died there," Tetry said. "A lot of people completely ignore everything I'm saying."
He said instead of turning to social media to learn about Oct. 7, he hoped his peers could turn to each other after hearing a firsthand account.
Club hopes to create dialogue between Jewish, non-Jewish students
"Our group decided that it would be a very fitting time to host a survivor of Oct. 7, specifically on the day before Yom Kippur begins," said Rabbi Efraim Tepler, the advisor to the school's Jewish Student Union. "We remember those who have fallen."
Part of the club's purpose is to create dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish students.
"I felt like the event was really informative, and it was very powerful to get a firsthand account of what happened," junior Helios Peng said.
"The thing that sparked this war was this horrible atrocity, so I hope that they actually get to learn that and understand that," Tetry said.
The group hopes this was the first step of many at the school to honor the lives lost on Oct. 7, and build connections instead of breaking them down.