Firsthand Account of October 7th with Yoel Shoshani

The voices that we were hearing, some of them were actually denying all of it. So we knew that it has to be something that we have to show because it’s so hard to believe. And I mean, it depends on the day and who was with us. But I remember certain groups of journalists that we took, I mean, there were thousands that were coming and just showing them, especially in the first few days, complete neighborhoods. Just imagine a neighborhood of houses, rows of houses that were all burnt. I don’t want to get too graphic, but you see children’s bedrooms just covered in blood and the world still questions and says, well, why did this happen? Well, I don’t think that that’s an appropriate question.

Yoel Shoshani is a dear friend of mine, he and his wife live here in DFW. Now they’re Israeli and they most recently just moved to Texas from Israel. And I wanted to just have a conversation with Yoel today as we are on the commemoration of what happened on October 7th, 2023 in Israel to the Jewish people. I think for a lot of us, it’s a day that we will never forget. Like 9/11 was where you remember what you were doing, you remember the first reactions that you had. But we mainly wanted to talk with you, Yoel, because we don’t want this to just be something that people look back on as an anniversary almost that, oh, that bad thing happened and thank God that won’t ever happen again. And just to talk about conversationally, your experience, I mean, where were you when this happened? Let’s just start there. Where were you when it happened?

So Tamara and I, we were visiting in Louisiana and we were part of a conference and we were just with people and we honestly woke up in the morning, our phones were blowing up and trying to figure out what’s going on, reading the news, patching things together, kind of in my mind I was just kind of like, ah, it’s an exaggeration, this can’t be. And the numbers kept growing and growing and growing. And I just remember seeing the numbers and I was like, oh, I think it was like 50 people killed or something. And when it went into the hundreds and then crossed the a thousand, I was like, what is going on? And you’re in the middle of nowhere. You’re not in Israel. We’re texting with our family. We’re on the phone. Our younger girls were in Israel, so our little girls were there with my parents. It wasn’t just a one location incident, so it happened in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, but the Hamas terrorist organization just started firing rockets all over Israel. So our little girls are with my parents, everything’s shut down suddenly. All the men are drafted that moment, I mean, it was like wartime. So my brothers were called up, both my brothers-in-law were called up. It was unbelievable. And I just remember trying to fake it going into this conference. We went into a meeting room and just sitting there and someone actually stopped everything and said, well, we know what’s going on in Israel and we need to talk and we need to pray for Israel right now, and this is a priority. So for us, it was a really, really difficult traumatic time. But at the same time, it was really encouraging to see just Christians say, whoa, whoa. No matter what we’re doing right now, we’re stopping. We’re praying for Israel. This is a big deal. So it’s really encouraging as well.

So tell us a little bit about the backstory of just your guys’ life. I mean, you were born and raised in Israel, obviously you mentioned you have kids. Tell us a little bit more about you, just to help us understand.
Yeah, born and raised in Israel, never lived anywhere else. On my dad’s side of the family, our family moved to Israel from Iran and Georgia, Eastern Europe country in 1892/93, so well before the state of Israel was established. And on my mom’s side of the family, she moved to Israel in the seventies from Boston. So kind of just like this eclectic thing. I think most Israelis are a mix of cultures, so I’m just one of that.

And for much of our audience, Yoel is a believer in Jesus, his family are believers, Jewish believers in Jesus. So when did your family, was it your parents that became believers – or give us a little bit of context.

Yeah, I mean, crazy story, but my dad lost his parents at quite a young age, and his older sister kind of raised him and took care of him from his teen years. And she came to the Lord and led him to the Lord in this kind of bubble of, I don’t know if there was a dozen or maybe a few dozen Jewish believers in Jesus in Israel and Yeshua as we say his name. So it was a really small community, and my mom met the Lord in college. She was studying in Chicago, even though she grew up in Boston area, studying in Chicago. Her roommate just ministered to her and led her to the Lord, and she came to Israel for some yeshiva, like Bible seminary style thing. And that didn’t work out because of her faith. She met my dad. And so I grew up in a believer home, but my parents grew up in a secular or religious, Jewish religious home, met the Lord. And so I’m first generation in our family to have known Yeshua from birth.

And how many brothers, sisters do you have?

We’ve got seven altogether. So I’m one of seven. So I got six others.

And you already mentioned this, but now we’re kind of drill back in to the October 7th experience. You had family that were serving in the military already, or I know that some were called up, but were some already serving. Walk us through some of that.

Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy because when you think about it, we’ve had military operations that some of our family members have had to participate in. So in Israel, this is how it works. When you’re 18, it’s a mandatory draft for everyone, boys and girls, you’re drafted into the military, you serve for whatever it is, two, three years, depending on your position. Sometimes more than that. If you sign up for professional military, then you could sign your entire life. It’s an entire career. And people get called up for reserves once a year, once every six months, once a month depending on your position. And so we’ve had different military operations that my siblings have been called up for, or I’ve been called up for, but it never was something like this. This was what’s called a form eight. That means that the government files an order that anybody that is eligible gets drafted, you don’t get any notice, you have to drop everything that you’re doing and come. So they issued that, I think it was over 300,000 soldiers in one day. I mean, this is full out war, so 300,000 soldiers. If you cut that down out of society, out of 10 million, just think of the numbers. So every single family in Israel was affected one way or the other. And my older brother’s a combat officer, my younger brother was already in reserve, so they just extended it. And then two of my brothers-in-Law were drafted as well to combat zones as well. I got a call from my officer, he said, Hey, I know you’re in the States right now. Can you show up? And I’ll tell you what, that was quite a challenge because all flights were canceled. So Tamara and I are in the States and our girls are back at home in Israel with my parents, and we don’t have a flight back. So that was kind of a challenge. We ended up spending a little bit of time trying to figure out our bearings, but getting on a flight back to Israel, kind of hopping through a few countries to get there, and I was drafted the next day.

What did you do and what was your role in serving the defense forces?

Yeah, I mean, I do different positions with the IDF spokesperson office. So some of it is working with journalists in the field. Some of it is just developing strategy and content for the work that we’re doing, but it was a lot of field work, mainly just taking journalists to learn about what’s going on. So taking them into the villages that were just ransacked and destroyed. That was a lot of what I was doing.

Let’s pause and talk about that a little bit because I don’t think there’s many other countries in the world that make it a point to bring people from around the world into their devastated, war obliterated, trauma zones. So why is it important? Why did Israel make such a strategic or intentional step in doing that? And you were a part of doing that bringing press to see these places where horrible, horrible things happen to people.

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand the depth of antisemitism to really even think about it. So Israel is always at a position where it has to justify anything that it does. So any sovereign country that was attacked in one day by 3,000 terrorists crossing their border, murdering decapitating, taking hostage, raping, killing children, women, elderly, shooting down, people spraying with machine guns, groups of people throwing grenades in the middle of rooms. I mean, the things that happened. And yet the world didn’t say, Israel, you have a right to defend yourself. No, it was, the voices that we were hearing, some of them were actually denying all of it. So we knew that it has to be something that we have to show because it’s so hard to believe. And I mean, it depends on the day and who was with us. But I remember certain groups of journalists that we took, I mean, there were thousands that were coming and just showing them, especially in the first few days, complete neighborhoods – just imagine a neighborhood of houses, rows of houses that were all burnt and there’s blood flowing, just the floors are full of blood, and you see cars that are just, I say sprayed, but they were covered in bullet holes. The smell, I mean the smell of death that was there. The families that are trying to find remnants of their lost ones, it took weeks to figure out where everyone was. The atrocities were unbelievable. You walk into a house and there’s a hole in the ground from a grenade that they threw into the house that blew up, and the shrapnel marks all over the house. I don’t want to get too graphic, but you see children bedrooms just covered in blood and the world still questions and says, well, why did this happen? Well, I don’t think that that’s an appropriate question. And I think for us as Bible believing people that love God and understand what’s going on, we have to really keep our eyes wide open and understand that this is a lot bigger than anything that we’re talking about. This is not, oh, just another military battle, military operation gone bad or just a terrorist attack. This is a lot deeper than that because the depth of evil that came out that day, I’ll tell you what, in my wildest imagination, I couldn’t imagine some of the darkest things that happened that day.

What was the response of some people that you brought through or that you saw go through? Was it similar, just shock and disbelief?

Yeah, it’s hard to really tell how it affected people. I remember one incident, I was with an editor of a large newspaper in the United States, and he walked into a house where it was a bedroom of children, and it was a very difficult sight to see, and the smells and just the entire, it was like all of your senses were just captivated by this horrible situation, and it was just this silence. Suddenly there was nothing to say. I just remember standing there and you’re kind of breathing from your mouth. The smell is so horrible. And you saw that something shifted. And I remember meeting a journalist from Germany, actually, and he came and he just wanted to talk. And you need to understand, these are groups, usually a bus or two full of journalists. Everyone’s with flak jackets, helmets because you’re still in mortar fire, still in sniper fire. So it’s a dangerous situation, at least in the beginning. It was a dangerous situation to be in, and you’re there.

And I remember this German, couple German journalists come and they just want to talk and they start sharing. They said, we’re Christians. And we volunteered in this kibbutz (community). They said, we came here many years ago and we volunteered. We helped them grow chickens and collect eggs or whatever they were doing. And they said, I remember, can I go there? Because we had to contain them in certain areas that were safe, and they really wanted to go see the dining room or the park or different areas that they knew in that area. And you could just see in their heart just this deep pain because they knew the truth, because they were there. They knew that the people that came and murdered were people that were working for these people. I mean, some of the stories are so horrible of the depth of the hatred is something that’s hard to comprehend. And they saw it firsthand. They said, look, we know that the residents of Gaza were employed by these people. We know that the food, the poultry that’s being provided to these people is coming from this community. And yet they came and destroyed it completely and destroyed the lives of these people. And there were some that were less phased. I don’t think it’s about the country. I think that it’s certain people, for some, I think it was just another war zone.

And for some, we were really questioned – some of the stories. They wanted deeper proof. They said, this isn’t enough of proof. And it really caught me by surprise actually, some of the questions. I don’t think that until that point for me in my age that I never really experienced the Holocaust or those things, I lived in Israel my whole life. I don’t think that up to that point in my life I ever understood the depth of antisemitism and what that actually is to be able to hate a group of people for the mere fact that they are that group of people. It blew my mind. I remember just sitting there thinking, there’s nothing I can say or do that’ll change the mind of somebody that hates me for my mere existence.

Right. Yeah. Man. So how do you process all this? I am not saying you’re speaking for every Jewish person or every Israeli, but talk about moving beyond October 7th into your life, post-October 7th. I mean, I know it was a whirlwind because you had to fly back, you had to show up and serve. But then what was it like just having to adjust to this new reality?

The reality of war is a reality of the Israeli people, of the Jewish people. It’s not new. Our kids do rocket drills. Rockets are coming. We have a drill. Every house in Israel that’s built since the nineties has to be equipped with a bomb shelter. One of our bedrooms is a steel/cement room that is a bomb shelter. And our kids know that when you hear that siren, that’s where you run. So we’re not running from tornadoes or things like that. Our kids know how to run from those things. And it’s a reality. It’s been many, many years now that we run to bomb shelters because of sirens going off because somebody decides that they’re shooting rockets at a group of people. Iran, when they sent 300 drones and rockets to Israel, I remember it was the middle of the night and the windows were shaking in our house. There was no siren going off because where we were was not deemed to be where rockets would fall, but our windows were literally shaking. And I remember my girls rushing into our bedroom and I’m looking at my wife and thinking, is this it? I mean, and I said to the girls, I tried to keep it cool, and I said, oh, everything’s okay. I don’t want to stress them out. So I said, why don’t you guys go downstairs to the bomb shelter – our bomb shelter’s in the bottom floor of our house. And there were mattresses there. We were preparing for something. So I said, why don’t you just go keep sleeping down there? And I remember looking out of the window and the entire sky is bright and there’s rocket’s coming in and the Iron Dome and David’s Sling and all these military systems are, you’re literally looking out of the window watching missiles get intercepted and fall down. And I’m just thinking, and then we just get up the next day and I need to move on. How do you move on? I mean, I hope that my kids did not know how bad that was that night, but how do you move on? And it’s painful and it’s difficult. And then the hard part for me is that I would expect when that happens is that everything’s cool. That the world is going to say, okay, now we get it. We’re with you. We need to put a stop to this. Especially when these countries are saying, they’re like, oh, we’re practicing on Israel. We’re coming for the us. This is literally what they’re saying. I’m not inventing them. I’m maybe paraphrasing, but this is what they’re saying. They’re saying the small states and the big sat and whatever they want to say, but they’re saying they’re coming for everyone else. And I look at the news and I see that people are demonstrating against the state of Israel because Israel is conducting a military operation in an area that is holding hundreds of Israelis as hostages. And I’m talking about soldiers that would not be okay to do that. But I’m talking about elderly women and men. I’m talking about babies a three month old baby, or I guess now over a year old baby is being held hostage and the world is telling Israel, well, you really shouldn’t be doing your military operations there. And I look at the universities, the demonstrations, man, there’s clarity. We need to have our eyes wide open and have clarity what’s right and wrong. Black is black and white is white. And we need to know and understand and discern the times and understand that that’s the reality. And we can’t just do what seems right or feels good, but we have to tell the truth and we have to say what’s right.

I feel that one thing sometimes before October 7th, the most tragic thing that’s happened in the life of the Jewish people was the Holocaust. And I’ve felt that today a lot of Christians, especially a little bit younger, don’t even really know how to approach it because they feel, I think especially for believers in Jesus, this sense of, I don’t even know how to connect with people that have gone through that level of trauma. And so how do people connect with someone who has like you and so many other people in Israel gone through what you’ve gone through? I mean, what is important to you guys? What do you need from us? Is what I’m asking? Not that you’re looking for anything from us, but how can we love and care for people that have gone through what you’ve gone through?

Yeah, I mean, so every Passover, we read the story because the Bible says you teach your children about the story of Egypt. And one of the things that we sing is kind of all these blessings and songs that we do in Passover – one of the things is that every generation should consider itself as if it itself has been freed from captivity in Egypt. And we may want to believe that there’s been generations of peace, but if you actually look at the history of the Jewish people, every generation has had some sort of very difficult thing to walk through. And it’s not even a one-time incident. It is a lifetime. I can talk about my teen years with bombs exploding downtown, and I can’t hang out with my friends because it’s dangerous to get on a bus or to go public places. But I think that when I look around me in every single one of those incidents, I see God use the people that love him, to love his people. So when God loves something and we love God, we love what he loves, and I look around me and I say, whether it’s the Holocaust or any other incident, I think that for a Christian that really loves God and reads the scriptures, there’s no other choice but to love the people of Israel. It doesn’t mean that they’re right. It doesn’t mean that they’re doing everything right, but it just means that God loves them and there’s a command to love them. And if we want to be close to God’s heart, man, this is close to his heart. This is painful. And what does that love look like? Sometimes we want to do these big grandiose gestures, and maybe we can sometimes, and those are great, but most of the time we just don’t want to feel alone. If someone sends me a message and says, Hey, praying for you guys, I don’t need to know the depth of his prayer. It really encourages me to know that people care enough to pray. And it really encourages me to see Christians sacrifice in such a difficult time to be a blessing for the people of Israel. I watched Christians donate during the war to people that needed help, whether it was food, whether it was for hotels, for people that couldn’t live in their homes, even military equipment that was missing. It was just like the Christians around the world really stepped up and said, Hey, hey, we’re going to sacrifice. How can we help? And without getting too personal, I’ll say those were the most exciting things to me in times of difficulty when people just said, Hey, thinking about you,
Hey, love you. What can I do for you? And it’s not always big things. Sometimes it’s just your heart needs to feel like you’re not lonely. And even in the Holocaust, if you go visit the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, there’s an entire kind of forest that they planted there, and next to every tree in that forest, a little plaque, and that’s called the forest of the righteous amongst the nations. Those were the Christians amongst the nations that were righteous in a very dark time. And I think that as I walk around and I’m surrounded by people that are just so kind, and the fact that somebody doesn’t know what’s going on in Israel doesn’t mean that they don’t love God. It just means that their focus is not on that. And I want to encourage everyone, I say, God can put different burdens on your heart. There’s not just one burden and that’s wonderful, but if God puts the burden of Israel on your heart, it’s going to be a pretty significant one. And standing with the people of Israel is not going to be the popular vote. And I think that if you look at what’s happening in universities and colleges around the US and even demonstrations on the streets, when you look at that and you go, are you going to stand up as a Christian? What are you going to do? I am not saying everyone needs to go on the streets and protest or express their opinions, but what are you going to do as a Christian to stand with the people that God loves?

Yeah. Well, it’s a great question to ask ourselves as we end seriously, because I think it’s something we really tell people a lot. Just ask God the question or ask yourself the question in God’s presence, really in prayer, God, am I concerned about the Jewish people because you pointed out really well. He obviously is. And then just take an assessment of where we’re at and then let the Lord lead you on how that looks after that. I think some people are surprised sometimes how many either Israeli or just Jewish people that are actually in their relational network, sometimes they don’t even know they’re there until the Lord kind of highlights it. So Yoel, thanks for sharing your perspective. It’s so important and for people to just especially hear that this wasn’t just something that happened a long way away to some random group of people, but it happened to real people living real lives and who are trying to build the kingdom of God and the importance of continuing to be a part of what God’s doing. So I really appreciate you sharing all that.

Yeah, appreciate you guys. Keep up the good work.

Thanks. Alright y’all, see you next time.