Exhibits › Humanity & Inhumanity › October 7th
October 7th: Collages of Catastrophe in Israel
Each of these collages is a lamentation, a passionate expression of pain, sorrow and confusion. In the Hebrew Bible lamentations are associated with the fall of Jerusalem and its failed leaders.
On October 7, 2023, over 1,000 Hamas terrorists entered southern Israel through nearly 30 breach points in the country’s border wall with Gaza. They blew holes in the wall and plowed through with bulldozers. They used paragliders to sail over the wall and employed drones to drop explosives on nearby Israeli observation towers.
Hamas is a radical Sunni Islamist organization located in the Gaza Strip, as well as in parts of the West Bank. Their long-planned operation resulted in the slaughter of over 1,200 innocent Israelis and the kidnapping of 253 Jewish men, women and children.
These young Muslim male terrorists beheaded and burned Jewish babies, killed Jewish children in front of their parents, killed Jewish parents in front of their children, burned Jewish people alive and violently raped Jewish women, often leaving them dead after the sexual assaults.
The Jewish people have not suffered such an atrocity since the Holocaust.
The famed IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security agency) and Israel’s political leaders were like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights of a speeding truck. They were frozen and bewildered by the blinding light of a surprise attack that they hadn’t believed possible.
It was hours before the IDF could get fighter jets into the air and days before they could muster even a haphazard counter-offensive.
The stark reality was that a swarm of terrorists with trucks, scooters and gliders had easily overwhelmed and circumvented the billion dollar high-tech fence and security buffer that Israel had erected.
Ironically, the Israelis who were massacred by Hamas terrorists on October 7th were from left-wing agricultural settlements (kibbutzim) and hipster “rave” goers from the north of the country. They were the “peaceniks” of Israeli society — those who would have accommodated themselves and their country to many Arab demands for a so-called “two state solution.”
From roughly November 2023 to February 2024, I created around 90 mixed media photo-collages. On most of the images I combined torn photos of Israeli men, women and children who were murdered and abducted on October 7th with iconic photos of their historical counterparts being herded to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Please visit “An Auschwitz Photo: A Rumination on Unspeakable Horror.”
My artwork has engaged the Jewish zeitgeist from mid-20th century to the present. It has been a challenging creative journey spanning nearly 50 years. Having just marked my 74th birthday, I see the end of my days, but not the end of days.
Although I feel a despair and angst as depicted in these images created in early 2023, I still remain in awe at the resilience of Jews throughout 2,500 years of recorded history and of life itself. I celebrated this “will to survive” in this series of images completed in 2021:
Surviving Auschwitz and Hiroshima: A Jewish Man and a Bonsai Tree
Bob Barancik
March 26, 2024
St. Petersburg, Florida
Over 3,500 young partygoers were gathered at Re’im, near the Gaza border, for the all-night Supernova rave. At dawn on October 7th, as missiles started raining down, hordes of Hamas terrorists infiltrated the area, killing 371 youngsters and kidnapping 40 more.
The panicked youngsters ran for their lives in all directions, by car and on foot through open fields, often hiding in flimsy structures, where they were brutally massacred, often after being raped.
As youngsters hid in bushes, kiosks, bathroom stalls and bomb shelters, they witnessed their companions being slaughtered by endless rounds of Hamas gunfire, as missiles continued to rain down throughout the attack.
The Bibas family — nine-month-old Kfir, four-year-old Ariel and their mother and father, Shiri and Yarden — brutally kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and still held captive in Gaza.
Nine-year-old Ohad Munder was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7th and released after almost two months in captivity. His resilience captured the nation’s heart as he solved a Rubik’s cube on his helicopter ride to freedom.
Four-year-old Uriah Brodutch from Kfar Aza and eight-year-old Ela Elyakim from Nahal Oz were taken captive with other family members on October 7th. They were returned to Israel during the hostage release in late November, but other members of their families are still held hostage in Gaza.
Noya Dan was a12-year-old autistic child who was a huge Harry Potter fan. She was brutally murdered, along with her 80-year-old grandmother, Carmel, on October 7th in Kibbutz Kissufim. It took two weeks to identify their mutilated bodies.
Over 500 bodies of massacred Israeli citizens remained unidentified in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. Most of these bodies were burned alive, with evidence of their having been tied together and mutilated. Forensic experts have managed to identify the vast majority, but are still working on the remaining bone fragments.
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I would like to thank Marsha Turken for her help in editing the texts, selecting the collages and writing the captions. Marsha is an academic editor, who formerly worked in Leadership Development at the American Jewish Committee. She lived in Israel for 30 years, where she immersed herself in the culture and the language.
10.7 Mayhem and Murder in Israel and Auschwitz 1944
