Leon faces the same hatred once again…

Shalom,

The sirens sounded twice before the explosion.

Leon was inside his home in Metula, a quiet town on Israel’s northern border, when a Hezbollah drone struck the roof and set the garden behind his house on fire.

His caregiver panicked. Leon tried to stay calm.

“I’ve had harder things than this in life,” he told our Fellowship staff. Leon is an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor. He was right.

Leon has lived through more than most of us can imagine. He was born in the former Soviet Union, where he endured anti-Semitism as a boy — beaten, he says, almost every day. His mother’s parents and his 87-year-old great-grandmother were murdered in the gas chambers. He came to Israel not for himself but for his children.

Now, decades later, Leon sits in a border town that is deeply affected by the war, and he will not leave. “Every Thursday and Friday the enemy wants to kill me,” he says, “and I don’t agree.”

There is grief in that sentence. There is also defiance. It is the same defiance the Jewish people have carried for generations — through the Holocaust, through exile, and through war after war.

It is the defiance they carry today, as we approach the third anniversary of October 7, 2023.

Today, we are asking you to pause with us — to witness what Leon and so many others are still living through, three years after the attacks that changed everything. And to help ease their suffering. 

Because of friends like you, The Fellowship was able to reach Leon within a day of the strike on his home, helping him travel to stay with relatives while repairs are made.

That is what your faithfulness makes possible — not just once, but again and again, for the people of Israel who refuse to look away from their homeland, even when danger is at their door.

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