Most of us born after the Holocaust never imagined that new kinot would need to be composed for anything that happened in our lifetimes.
Some kinot appear to be exaggerated, meant to cause the reader to mourn. Yet those events that seemed impossible in the 1930s became true again in the 1940, and those that seemed to be part of history last year became current events on Simchat Torah.
There is no exaggerstion needed when talking about how Jews have been treated.
Some of the kinot describe, in gruesome yet poetic detail, specific events to individuals and small details of the larger tragedies, which make them more personal and more awful. And that is what happened on October 7.
Tzohar issued a booklet that describes how old kinot are seen through a new lens. Here's one small but giant story:
Just a few hours after the war broke out, the police and IDF announced the opening of a forensics identification center for the dead at the Shura military base. Teams of police officers, ZAKA volunteers, IDF personnel, doctors and forensic technicians, worked tirelessly for months until they identified all the victims:“A bone. A tooth. A sliver of skull. They came in bags, endless bags, mixed with ash, coins, bullets and shrapnel. Like imperfect tapestries, some held the remains of different people. The bags were numbered, catalogued and scanned. DNA was extracted. The science was precise, but it was hard to know what happened, how a person was killed.”One bag, which held clues to the final seconds of life, unnerved and intrigued Dr. Chen Kugel, head of the National Center of Forensic Medicine. Since October 7th, his staff has been working on identifying the remains of some of the 1,200 people killed by Hamas militants. He has been trying to understand not only the causes of death but also the underlying hate. Both, he said, often lie beyond one’s imagination. He pointed to a computer screen.“This is a piece of something that looks like charcoal,” he said. “But then you see it through a CT scan, and you see two spines, one of an adult and one of someone younger, maybe 10 or 12 years old. And two sets of ribs. You can see they are roped around with this metal wire. These were people who were hugging one another and burned while they were tied together. It might be a parent and a child.”
Tzohar published a new kina, beautfully translated into English as well:
Rabbi Moshe Hauer of the Orthodox Union modified an existing kina to refer to the event of October 7:
Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, president of the World Mizrachi Movement, also penned his own kinah with Biblical allusions.
Two other kinot, one from a survivor of the massacre and another from a daughter of a survivor, are worth reading. They do not end with the traditional lines of comfort that traditional kinot do.
