This is an editorial reflecting the views of the publisher.
Three years ago today, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged 251 hostages back across the border, according to the Associated Press. On this October 7 anniversary, The Boston Report’s publisher says plainly what this city’s Jewish neighbors have needed to hear for three years: we stand with Israel, we remember the murdered and the kidnapped, and we mean the words “Never Again.”
Remembering October 7, Three Years Later
The victims were families asleep in kibbutz homes, young people dancing at a music festival, grandparents, soldiers and police officers who ran toward the gunfire. For more than two years, the hostages and their families lived through an ordeal the whole world could watch. Twenty surviving hostages came home on Oct. 13, 2025, and the remains of the last hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, were returned to Israel on Jan. 26, 2026, completing the accounting for all 251 people taken, as the American Jewish Committee and the AP have documented.
That this is the first October 7 anniversary with no hostages left in Gaza is a relief. It is not closure. Families are burying, mourning and rebuilding, and survivors carry what they saw for the rest of their lives. Remembering them by name, and refusing to let what happened that day be blurred or denied, is the least we owe them.
Why We Stand With Israel, and What “Never Again” Means
Standing with Israel means affirming a simple principle: a democracy has the right to exist, to defend its citizens and to bring its kidnapped people home. We have written before about Israel’s story of survival and renewal, and that story has rarely felt more tested than it has since Oct. 7.
“Never Again” was born from the Holocaust. It was never meant only as a memory. It is a promise that the murder of Jews for being Jews will be named, confronted and never treated as somebody else’s problem. In Boston, that promise stands in glass and light at the New England Holocaust Memorial, dedicated near Faneuil Hall in 1995. Its six towers are a daily reminder of where hatred leads when decent people look away.
Standing with Israel is not a statement against Palestinian civilians, who have also suffered terribly in this war, or against our Muslim neighbors here in Massachusetts. Grief is not a competition. But moral clarity about a deliberate massacre of civilians is not optional, and neither is our responsibility to the Jewish families who live on our streets. Readers following the war’s aftermath can find our reporting on efforts such as Gaza reconstruction planning.
Antisemitism in Massachusetts Is Not Abstract
The numbers tell us why “Never Again” has to be lived out locally. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents counted 279 antisemitic incidents in Massachusetts last year, with Boston recording 57, the most of any city in the state. That total was down 36% from 2024, but ADL New England says the region still sits at nearly double its pre-Oct. 7 levels, and incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools in Massachusetts rose from 50 to 75.
Federal data point the same way. The FBI counted 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents nationwide in 2025, the third-highest year on record and about 63% of all religion-based hate crimes, according to an ADL analysis of the FBI figures, even though Jews make up roughly 2% of the U.S. population. Massachusetts legislative leaders, announcing the final report of the state’s antisemitism commission, cited FBI data showing that 84.4% of religious-bias hate crimes in the Commonwealth were committed against Jews. Our full look at antisemitism data and the state response lays out what officials are doing about it, and our earlier coverage of antisemitism security measures abroad shows this is not only an American problem.
Boston’s Jewish Community Helped Build This City
Boston would not be Boston without its Jewish community. By 1910, roughly 40,000 Jews lived in the old West End, according to Boston College’s Global Boston project. Families later moved down Blue Hill Avenue through Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, then out to Brookline, Newton and Sharon, carrying their synagogues and schools with them. Today, CJP’s 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study counts 333,100 people living in 138,200 Jewish households across the region.
The institutions they built serve everyone. Boston’s Federation of Jewish Charities, founded on April 25, 1895, was the first Jewish federation in the United States, according to the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center; it grew into today’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies. Beth Israel Hospital opened on Townsend Street in Roxbury in 1916 with 45 beds and is today part of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Boston doctors pioneered heart pacing and delivered the first IVF baby born in Massachusetts. Hebrew SeniorLife, founded in Dorchester in 1903, is a national leader in caring for older adults. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, formed in 1944 in response to antisemitic violence on Boston’s streets, went on to champion civil rights, Soviet Jewry and interfaith partnership. Nearby in Waltham, Brandeis University was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community as a nonsectarian university open to students facing discrimination elsewhere.
Jewish Bostonians have shaped this city’s medicine, law, business, philanthropy, scholarship and culture for more than 150 years. Our history of Boston’s Jewish community tells that story in more detail.
What Boston Owes Its Jewish Neighbors
On this anniversary, Boston should show up. Attend a commemoration this week, call out antisemitism when you see it at school, at work or online, and support the institutions that keep Jewish life safe and open. Elected leaders should keep funding security for houses of worship and follow through on the antisemitism commission’s recommendations.
Three years after the darkest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the message from this publication is simple. We remember. We stand with Israel and with Boston’s Jewish community. Never again means never again, in Israel, in Boston and everywhere else.
— Peter Sinclaire, Publisher, The Boston Report