Never Again is Happening Again​​​​

     The orphaned child weeping on the left, Simcha Shmuelowicz, is in Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration and slave labor camp in 1944. His entire family - parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and almost all the Jewish residents of his town were murdered. The Nazi regime systematically murdered six million Jews using gas chambers, mass shootings, intentional starvation, untreated illness and disease, poor unsanitary living conditions, and harsh treatment. This state-sponsored genocide is known as the Holocaust. Many Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps solely for their Jewish faith, dehumanized into slave labor, stripped of their identities and referred to by numbers tattooed on their arms rather than their names. Two-thirds of European Jewry were systematically murdered by the Nazis. The Nazis, along with their allies and collaborators, also committed mass atrocities, resulting in the deaths of millions of non-Jewish individuals as well. Following World War II, the rallying cry was "Never Again" as a vow to prevent such horrors from recurring.

       The painting of 2024 portrays Kfir Bibas, a ten-month-old red-haired Israeli red-haired child, who was abducted by Arab terrorists along with his four-year-old brother Ariel, and his mother Shiri. His father Yarden was beaten, as evidenced by a photo, and taken hostage by a group of Hamas terrorists and is also being held captive in Gaza along with hundreds of others. Shiri's parents, who lived near them in the same Kibbutz Nir Oz, were murdered on October 7, 2023.  According to Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Esq, President of Shurat HaDin, on that day, three thousand terrorists from Gaza breached the border wall in three waves and invaded the country of Israel in the early morning. The first wave was a thousand Hamas terrorists, and the second two waves were two thousand Gazan militants who infiltrated 24 Israeli towns and kibbutzim and targeted the Nova music peace festival and all committed heinous atrocities, including murder; shooting; decapitation; tying-up and burning of people alive; arson; baking infants in ovens; cutting off limbs; luting and destroying people and property; brutal sexual violence; extreme torture; and horrific mutilation of thousands of innocent civilians in Israel.  Men, women, elderly, and children were massacred and kidnapped solely because they were Jewish or resided in Israel. The attackers gleefully screamed "Allah Akbar" after each murder as can be seen on their own Go-cam video recordings as they laughed, cheered, and many called their parents to excitedly tell them how many Jews they each murdered.  They recorded their own hateful acts of violence and posted their evil atrocities on social media.  Released hostages later reported that when they were brought into Gaza by the Hamas terrorists and paraded through Gazan streets, thousands of citizens of Gaza gathered, cheered, and beat them with sticks and bats as they were dragged by their elated captors. The Gazan captors sold the hostages to Hamas who took them to underground hot, humid, airless tunnels, where they continued to torture them.

           Today Israel is defending its citizens and fighting a war in Gaza against Hamas terrorists. The Israeli Defense Force is conducting operations to search for and rescue the hostages. Israel is determined to neutralize the terrorists' threat and to prevent further attacks, as the Gazan terrorist assailants have repeatedly promised to "continue violently attacking Israelis again and again and again".  Unfortunately, there are hostages still being held and tortured in  the tunnels of Gaza for over 300 days and we pray they will be safely released and united with their families soon.

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