Israel’s Jewish humor show offers a serious message for a dark time: We will survive

The Jews Are Coming, a satirical show on Kan 11 that explores connections between today’s events and milestones of Jewish history released a dark, powerful sketch this week that has gone viral. It shows how throughout every era, Jews have faced the same kind of pogroms that Hamas carried out in Israel on October 7 and how the attacks and terrorism have fueled a resolve to rebuild their communities out of the ashes, across millennia – and includes testimony from today’s Israelis.

Starting in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, a woman describes being awakened by a loud noise in the morning and realized that the Romans were burning the Temple. “In an instant they had filled the streets,” she recalls. “We heard screaming from afar, so we closed the windows and locked the doors and sat in silence without saying a word. Then we heard shrieking from the house next door.” Take out the word “Romans” and replace “burning the kibbutz” with “burning the Temple” and this could be an exact testimony from an October 7 survivor.

The words spoken continue to recall, in precise detail, scenes that could have taken place last fall near the Gaza border,  as a Jew in 1096 in Cologne recounts, “We realized they’d broken into our neighbor’s house . . . We heard them screaming until silence fell. We thought of escaping to the forest but everyone who tried to escape found that it was impossible.”

Past and present

Moving on to the infamous pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, a man says, “They waited in the streets and grabbed everyone who went outside. The snow mixed with the blood. We waited for someone to come help us, the police, the army, somebody, but nobody came. We prayed to God but He didn’t come either. We felt so alone. Then they came pounding at our windows and so we quickly grabbed the kids and ran up to the attic.”

These words, coming just before the release on Wednesday of a video of Hamas capturing female IDF border observers on October 7 and shows evidence of rape and beatings as the terrorists spent hours on the Nahal Oz base with no one from the IDF or the police attempting a rescue, hits especially hard.

Shifting to Hebron in 1929, a witness describes the massacre there: “We could see all the houses around us going up in flames, we saw the faces of people we bought vegetables from only yesterday turning into beasts.”

In 1938 Berlin, another man describes the Kristallnacht pogrom. “They were maniacs. They smashed the shop windows, I saw them torch my sister’s shop and they moved on and torched the synagogue and everything was filled with smoke and glass. I never imagined that human beings could do such things. It was like looking human evil in the eye.”

Moving back to the Middle East, a man in Baghdad in 1943 says that the persecutors knew which houses to enter because they had marked them with red paint. In a chilling line that could be lifted from the news in Israel in early October, “My little one asked if they were going to kill us, too. I didn’t know what to tell her. I said, ‘At least we’re together.’ “

From there, the sketch moves straight to Kfar Aza in 2023, as a woman says, “Everyone asks if we can go on living with this. We have no choice. We must carry on step by step and start rebuilding from scratch.”

She is joined by the other Jews throughout history, pledging to rebuild everything that was burned and destroyed, and to keep fighting for their community and their nation. The woman from Jerusalem in 70 CE adds: “Because we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to keep living here.” They all speak about they know deep inside that they will be able to keep going, but it closes with them wishing for one last hug from the loved ones they have lost.

While audiences usually enjoy laughing with the cast of The Jews Are Coming, fans have embraced this clip, which will elicit tears from many viewers.