Jordyn TilchenInstagram6 Oct 2026
It will never not feel strange talking about my own experience of October 7th. I was a new immigrant to Israel, and in so many ways, my story is not the one that needs to be told. I wasn’t at Nova. I wasn’t in a kibbutz in the Gaza envelope (this photo was taken when I visited Be’eri months later). I wasn’t taken hostage. I didn’t lose a child, a sibling, a parent or a partner that morning. There are stories from that day that are so much more horrific than mine that sometimes it feels almost self-indulgent to talk about what October 7th did to me. And yet, mine is the story I know best because it’s the one I lived. I know what it felt like to wake up that morning and slowly realize that something incomprehensible was happening in the country I had just chosen to make my home. I know what it felt like to watch the death toll climb, to learn names and faces, to wait for people to answer their phones, to understand what it felt like to go to sleep in one Israel and wake up in another. I also know what it felt like in the days and months afterward to watch the rest of the world begin talking about that day in ways that sometimes felt completely detached from what Israelis had actually lived through. So I talk about my October 7th experience knowing that it is only one tiny new immigrant story inside an enormous collective trauma. Not because mine is the most important. Certainly it’s not. But because I was there and I’ll never be the same again. And because it’s the one story I can tell entirely from my own bones.
