Written by Founder & Executive Director, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor
For the Jewish people, this Passover week is one marked by a major theme: liberation. At the beginning of the week in Israel we celebrated Yom Ha’aliyah. In the Bible, during this date in the Hebrew calendar, the Israelites first entered into the Promised Land after wandering the desert for 40 years. Since 2009, the year I made Aliyah to Israel from Maryland at age 18, it has also become a day to celebrate the contributions of Jewish immigrants to the modern Israeli State.
On Friday, Jewish families will congregate around their Seder plates to commemorate and celebrate the same miraculous liberation of the oppressed slave-nation Israelites from Egypt that led to their forging as a faith-based Nation, the Jewish People, first choosing to accept the Torah and then starting out on a long vagabond journey to their Homeland.
That’s often how life really is: first you make a choice, then you start a journey.
I am proud to say that the team that has been working so hard on the Global ARC platform to fight online antisemitism is a team of olim, Jewish immigrants, who left everything that they knew, one from Kansas and one from Italy, to live out their Jewish identity in the modern Jewish homeland and build it out for the better. This is no accident. The story of Jewish immigrants, like the story of immigrants tends to be, is one of ambition, of betterment, and of adventure.
For the Jewish people, our immigration story has the added weight throughout history of seeking out our liberation, sovereignty, and freedom from oppression and antisemitism.
Sadly, in many ways, the Jewish people are still wandering—recently, we found ourselves again in desperate search of freedom from Jew-hatred even in our own modern democratic homeland, the State of Israel. This week, although there is much to celebrate, I cannot help but think of the families who will gather without their loved ones this Passover and Easter. Innocent Israeli women and men who were taken away, murdered by the latest antisemitic wave of terror here in Israel. Some of them parents, some of them recently engaged, some of them not even Jewish, but targeted as citizens and public servants of the Jewish state–all of them meaningful to someone, each of their lives, precious.
May their memories be blessed.
May we all know safety, liberation, and freedom from hatred in our lifetime.
