Rabbi Steven Burg
The Jewish world — and hopefully, decent people everywhere — mourn the devastating loss of Avraham Azulay, who was brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
Avraham, a 25-year-old reservist from Yitzhar in Samaria, was operating a construction vehicle in Khan Yunis when Hamas militants stormed the area. In a moment that speaks volumes about his courage, they tried to take him hostage, to add him to their horrific “collection” of captives, but he fought back. He refused to be another number, another pawn in their terror campaign. And for that, they murdered him.
This story is tragic. But when you hear the whole story, the heartbreak becomes almost too much to bear.
Avraham had just married his wife, Ruth, three months ago. They were newlyweds, starting their lives, dreaming of a future together. Now a widow, Ruth has already faced unimaginable pain: Her brother was also killed in combat in Gaza.
These are the kinds of losses we’ve read about in Holocaust books and memorials — entire families decimated, young lives cut down, a generation’s hope extinguished before it could fully bloom. This isn’t just a personal tragedy. This is a biblical loss Yitzhar — a moment of communal mourning that echoes across our history and our souls.
Raised in the town of Elazar in Samaria, Avraham later moved to Yitzhar as a teenager. He was a builder in every sense of the word, founding a construction business dedicated to developing the area’s infrastructure and roads. As Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan noted, Avraham “was a hero, a true pioneer, devoted with all his soul to the settlement of the hills and to the IDF.” He built Israel not just with his hands but with his heart.
Our hearts are broken. And we must allow them to stay broken.
We must not become numb. We cannot get used to Jewish blood being spilled. We cannot become desensitized to the funerals, the shivas, the grieving mothers, the destroyed dreams. Every Jewish life is a world. Every murder is a cosmic tear in the fabric of our people.
Meanwhile, across the world, we hear voices shamelessly calling for a “global intifada.” This is not an abstract slogan. Every single Jew in the world knows what intifada means. It meant bombs on public buses and explosions in pizza shops. It meant death and terror for Israelis and tourists alike simply going about their lives.
Even in the heart of the Jewish Diaspora, in New York City, the largest Jewish population center outside of Israel, a mayoral candidate, Zohar Mamdani, refuses to condemn that vile slogan, a call for the death and destruction of Jews worldwide. This is not theoretical. This is not rhetoric. This is what it looks like: a young Jewish man, married just three months ago, is murdered. His wife is left shattered, grieving both a husband and a brother.
Mamdani, who led the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter when he was a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, now seeks to bring this ideology to City Hall. By refusing to denounce calls to “Globalize the intifada,” he has shown his true colors. He is not just a candidate with differing political views; he is effectively a cheerleader, an instigator for violence against Jews, unwilling to back down from a slogan that has only one meaning to those who lived through the horror of those years in Israel from 2000 to 2005.
New York City deserves better. The largest Jewish community in America deserves leaders who don’t equivocate when it comes to terrorism and violence. We cannot allow someone who embraces such dangerous rhetoric to lead our city. This will be a fight for the soul of New York, a fight we cannot afford to lose.
We cannot, and will not, allow this to crush the Jewish spirit.
We will cry. We will mourn. We will hold each other close. But we will also rise. We will fight evil, whether it’s in Gaza or in the form of politicians who seek to bring that evil to the halls of City Hall. We will never be silent in the face of those who celebrate Jewish death and disguise it as political ideology.
For 2,000 years, we have endured. We have survived inquisitions, pogroms, genocides and wars. We are stronger than ever. We will stand tall not because we forget, but because we remember. We remember who we are. We recognize the cost of our survival. And we remember our heroes.
Avraham Azoulay was one of those heroes, the 31st soldier from the Samaria Council to fall in this war, sacrificing his life for the nation and the land while doing what he loved: building Israel.
May his memory be a blessing.
May his wife, Ruth, and her entire family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
May we soon see the day when swords are turned into plowshares, when the hostages come home, and when peace reigns in Jerusalem and throughout the world.
Rabbi Steven Burg is CEO of Aish. He serves on the board of governors of the Jewish Agency as an executive board member of the Rabbinical Council of America. Prior to Aish, he was eastern director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City and contributed to the center’s fight against antisemitism.
