Three years after October 7, Spertus learners and alumni reflect on the Jewish community, leadership, and the choice to hold on to joy.
There is a growing consensus that successful and holistic Israel education demands a sophisticated and multi-dimensional engagement with critical questions within Israel, and in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This feels especially pressing in a post-Oct. 7 world. Despite this critical need, many educators continue to express reticence about conflict education.
In the weeks after October 7, 2023, Dr. Keren E. Fraiman, now Spertus Institute’s Vice President and Chief Academic Officer, traveled to Israel and reflected on a phrase she was hearing everywhere: everything had changed.
She was not yet sure we could know what that meant.
“In the midst of crisis, it is often hard to know what will change and what will return,” she wrote. Her questions reached beyond the immediate moment: How would Jews hold individual experiences alongside a broader collective memory? How would we make room for complexity and divergent narratives? How would October 7 reshape the relationship between Israel and world Jewry? What had changed, and what would endure?
Three years later, those questions have not become simpler. And reflections that were initially framed through the lens of Israel education have become broader for North American Jewish communities that have seen both increased antisemitism and internal disagreements.
We returned to these questions in conversations with three Spertus learners and alumni whose work places them in different corners of Jewish communal life and education: Stacie Gabert, Executive Director of Temple Sinai in South Burlington, Vermont; Sara Sideman, Executive Director of the Katz JCC in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; and Gary Weisserman, CEO of Holocaust Museum Houston.
Their experiences do not produce a single answer to questions of what has changed and what has returned. But each offers a window into how Jewish leaders have navigated the years since October 7, and how learning, community, and connection have shaped the choices they have made.
Stacie Gabert: Choosing Community
Certificate in Jewish Leadership (Cohort 12) alum and current Executive MA in Jewish Professional Studies student
For Gabert, one of those choices came almost immediately. In the days after October 7, Temple Sinai was preparing for a Shabbaton at a moment when gathering for celebration suddenly felt complicated. Some questioned whether proceeding was appropriate. Gabert and her community chose to continue, while making space for what had happened and what people were carrying.
The decision foreshadowed a challenge that would become increasingly familiar: how to create Jewish community when people arrive with different emotions, experiences, and relationships to Israel. In the years since, Gabert has navigated difficult conversations about Israel and antisemitism while supporting members confronting those issues in their own schools, workplaces, friendships, and families.
In that work, she has drawn directly from her experience at Spertus. Gabert recalled classroom conversations about Israel in which differing perspectives could be expressed openly and respectfully. Seeing those difficult conversations held without requiring everyone to arrive at the same conclusion offered a model she could bring back to her own community.
That approach also echoes something Gabert has explored in her own writing: what it means to remain connected when Jews do not see Israel, or one another, in the same way. “Peoplehood doesn’t ask us to think alike,” she wrote. “It asks us to stay connected.”
Sara Sideman: Learning in Real Time
Leadership Certificate in Combating Antisemitism for Professionals (Cohort 2) Alum
Sideman entered Spertus’ Leadership Certificate in Combating Antisemitism expecting to study a subject she already considered urgent. She had applied months before October 7. Then the cohort’s first Zoom session took place just days after the attacks.
“We had started this program thinking that we were going to learn about antisemitism,” she recalled. When the group gathered online that week, the distinction between study and practice had disappeared. Participants were suddenly navigating the very issues they had enrolled to understand. “It felt even more important to do the program, because it was something we were living through in that moment.”
At the time, Sideman was leading a large Jewish summer camp in southern New Jersey. In the years that followed, the questions she was studying became increasingly practical ones: how to respond when families objected to Israeli staff or Israeli culture, how to help Jewish young people feel pride rather than fear, and how to help non-Jewish staff understand their own role in sustaining Jewish communal life.
She continues that work today at the Katz JCC, including conversations with non-Jewish colleagues about what it means to be a Jewish communal professional and the “very vital role” they play in “building Jewish community and advancing Jewish joy.”
Those experiences have also made Sideman clearer about her own responsibility as a leader. “I’ve learned to stand my ground on my values,” she said. “I’ve learned as a leader that it’s okay to own who we are.” For Sideman, that includes being unapologetically Jewish and maintaining a relationship with Israel without requiring agreement with every political decision.
Gary Weisserman: From Memory to Action
Leadership Certificate in Combating Antisemitsm for Professionals (Cohort 4) Alum
For Weisserman, October 7 sharpened questions that ultimately became professional as well as personal. After years in Jewish education, he chose to move into Holocaust education and remembrance. “I couldn’t think of anything more important after October 7th that I could possibly be engaged in,” he said. “I wanted to be more directly engaged in the fight against antisemitism and the fight against Holocaust denial.”
At Holocaust Museum Houston, that conviction has translated into a specific philosophy of what remembrance should accomplish. “We have to make this history a living history,” he said, describing the museum’s goal of moving people from “memory to moral action.”
His experience as a Spertus learner has offered another kind of community. Weisserman described his cohort as “very, very powerful,” noting that members continue to interact with one another after completing the program. “Many of them are young leaders that also give me hope,” he said.
That idea of hope also shapes how Weisserman understands his work at the museum. “Actually, this is the most hopeful place I know. I don’t know more hopeful people than our survivors,” he said. For those who spend their days confronting “the very worst humanity can do” and still believe in the possibility of light, he said, “that is, to me, the very definition of radical optimism.”
And when he thinks about younger Jews growing up in this moment, Weisserman does not want threat to become the entirety of their Jewish identity. He wants them to be proud Jews, he said, “not to bear the burden but none of the joy.”
That tension between burden and joy runs through all three experiences. So does a commitment to community: remaining connected through disagreement, creating spaces for Jewish pride and belonging, and allowing memory to shape what comes next rather than simply preserving what came before.
Three years ago, Fraiman wondered what would change and what would endure. These three experiences do not offer a single answer. But they suggest that what endures is not simply what Jewish communities preserve. It is what they continue to build: spaces for disagreement without disconnection, memory that can lead to action, and a Jewish life shaped not only by what has happened to Jews, but by what they continue to choose, create, and carry forward.