Hundreds of filmmakers and researchers are currently traveling to places where those who witnessed the events of October 7 are staying and filming long testimonies to the events of Black Saturday. The goal: to begin the process of coping with the trauma and create a historical archive of testimonies. To date, about 60 testimonies have been collected, which will soon be uploaded to the social networks Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, as well as to the Israel Hayom website – but the group plans to reach thousands of testimonies. To that end, she is looking for witnesses who have not yet told their stories and other volunteers to document the harrowing stories. You can sign up to testify or volunteer for the project.
"The idea is to build an archive here that first of all tells the story of what happened on the seventh of October, first of all, and allows the witnesses to tell what happened. There are a lot of studies that talk about how giving testimony is a process that can help cope with trauma, when it is done under the right conditions, when it is done with the right accompaniment," explains Dr. Renana Kedar, who participates in the project.
Kedar, a faculty member at the Hebrew University's Faculty of Law and head of the university's Center for Digital Humanities, is one of several researchers working on historical testimonies and archiving who joined the project. "There are a lot of people who have spoken in the press, on the networks – but for every one of them there are many more who haven't spoken, who haven't reached them, who don't want to talk yet, who can't speak yet. We don't pressure anyone in any way. Anyone who wants to talk and feels that it suits him now will come to us. And whoever doesn't – we'll come back to him in a year. This project is not a project for a month."
"The purpose of this thing is now very clear, as there are statements of denial around the world, or confusion, and sometimes fake news," says Dr. Ohad Opaz, a documentary filmmaker and lecturer in the field of documentary creation and testimony at Oranim College. "The goal is to bring the perspective of those who were there — to bring their experience, the horror, the horror."
Opaz is one of the founders of the "Testimony 710" project (named after the date of events – 7.10), which was launched a few days after the massacre in the southern settlements and the "Nova" nature party in Reim. "We heard about Saturday's events, the seventh to the tenth. Many people turned to documentation—especially survivors of the party—looking for who would hear their story. One of the problems with people posting their story online is that they simply have no one to tell, or no one to listen to them patiently, because there is not always time for people who are listening. One of the problems is a sense of loneliness in the memories."
They give people a listening handcuff - and a camera. Ohad Opaz, Photo: Itay Kan-Tor
On the other hand, "a lot of documenters wanted to go out, meet the communities, listen, share in grief. We quickly gathered the people – a group of documenters, of whom I am one – and asked to prepare them to testify to the event. For such a difficult crisis, you need preparation, you need a method that is very different from the approaches of news broadcasts. Something that much more allows the interviewee to express himself without limitations."
The method that Opaz relies on was developed by psychiatrist Dori Laub, who led the Post-Holocaust Video Testimonies Project. "The idea is to listen, with as few questions as possible—to let people tell sequentially, from beginning to end."
The person who helped quickly assemble a team of volunteers with photography and documentation capabilities is Sagi Aloni (47), who works in the founding team of the Dankel and is active in the protest. "We were networked and operative, and we were based on the documentation system of the protest, which could be deployed in 150 locations throughout the country.
"On the second or third day of the war, we tried to find out how we could use these capabilities. We tried to figure out what our ability to help was. We saw a lot of media, like everyone else, and we saw that most of the witnesses and interviewees came to give a very short story, usually very dramatic, very catchy." The team included filmmakers who specialized in testimonies of Holocaust survivors, and outlined the direction of lengthy documentation as part of the process of coping with trauma.
One of the volunteers participating in the documentation is Talia Finkel, a veteran and well-known documentary film director and producer. "It was important for me to come volunteer in my profession – it's something I can do much better than cooking, for that matter. It's something I know how to do and I'm professional at and very good at, and I connect quickly with people, and it's convenient to talk to me."
She talks about the importance of the project by comparing it with the archive of Holocaust testimonies created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg: "The Spielberg archive or Holocaust testimonies we hear today are given several years after the difficult event. Here there are people who went through it two weeks ago, so it's actually very fresh.
"Human memory changes, and as time goes on you tell yourself the story in slightly different ways, with slightly different emphases. The advantage of this initiative is that the documentation is actually very, very close to the truth – I mean, they haven't had time to process what happened, and they really tell it as it is. Maybe if you ask those people 20 years from now, they'll remember things a little differently."
"It was important for me to come and volunteer in my profession." Talia Finkel, Photo: Efrat Eshel
Of the delicate work with survivors of the events, compared to her usual interview work as a documentary filmmaker, she says: "I spoke to a psychologist, through the organization, and she explained to me how best to talk. We don't force anyone to talk, and we also tell them at the beginning that if they don't want to say something, if they said something and regretted it, if they want to stop in the middle – anything is possible.
"I don't pull anyone's tongue. Unlike what I do in documentaries, where I often know what I want, or what sentence will be 'none,' and I need punchlines to make an hour-long film out of them, so if it's said and at exactly the same time the person pokes his nose, I'll tell him, 'OK, let's say it again without picking your nose.' It's a practice I won't use in taking testimony. Here the goal is just to hear the story."
The goal of film crews, Finkel says, is to help witnesses "frame the story, help them see their strengths within the story; Say, someone told me that he wished he had stayed longer at the party, because he could have helped more of his friends, more people. But I can come and say, 'The fact that you didn't stay at the party longer is what saved you and the people who were with you.'"
Itai Kan-Tor, Opaz's teaching colleague at Oranim College and the person responsible for most of Yad Vashem's archive of photographic testimonies, says that the initiative has already been joined by about 200 volunteers from various fields – documentary filmmaking, still photography, 360 photography for virtual reality, psychological therapy, computing, and social network management. "The goal is to create a database of testimonies of survivors from the events of this terrible Shabbat, with both the short and long term in mind; We are establishing an archive of testimonies, where, on the one hand, any such testimony (subject to the approval of the witness) is prepared for a short version, which will be immediately exposed to the public, and on the other hand, it is already catalogued according to archive codes, so that it can be used by researchers and filmmakers in the future."
We are trying to create an archive that will suit both the needs of the present and the needs of the future. Itai Kan-Tor, Photo: Michal Kan-Tor
"The guiding principle of the testimonies we collect is to listen fully. Less penetrating, less dealing with intrusive questions, not diving into questions of emotion and not asking for details," he stresses. "Our technique is based on a question that begins before the event, and then a very general request to hear about the event itself, and at the end of talking about where they are after the event, when we interview them, in order to give the feeling of leaving the event and the hope that still lies in the fact that they live in a certain place and left the event."
Aloni estimates that the lives of no less than 100,000 Israelis changed radically during that Shabbat. The testimonies are so numerous and varied that Finkel notes that a situation has arisen in which the testimonies collectors develop a kind of terrifying gradient to the testimonies. "I had a day of filming with people from Netiv Ha'Asura, who ended up sitting in their safe room and didn't go outside – they didn't encounter terrorists, they didn't physically commit the atrocities. I came out of that day and said to the photographer: 'Look, it was a relatively easy day,' and then at night it suddenly fell on me that it wasn't easy at all, because the people I talked to thought what they were doing now, because they were going to die. There was a man there who said, 'I've already planned what I'm doing to my wife so that if they come in, they can't abuse her.' Someone who came out of the safe room, because they were called out, and she didn't know if it was the IDF or someone Israeli whom the terrorists put a gun to their head, said to her son: 'Well, I go out first, and you take pictures on WhatsApp – and if they shoot me, you send it straight away.' Think about what a person goes through when he comes to something like this. Even the relatively less terrible things are very terrible."
A volunteer in the "Testimony 710" project collects a surviving testimony, photo: Avital Schindler
The "Testimony 710" project tries to photograph the testimonies according to uniform and high standards – both in terms of image quality and sound quality. After filming, the materials are sent to the editors, who create a long version of all the testimony in cleaning the director's notes, and an abbreviated version of 5-7 minutes for sharing on social networks.
Israeli high-tech companies such as Wix, Monday, Verbit and Edea provide the support and technological infrastructure for creating the archive. Project personnel are also in contact with the National Library and universities in Israel and abroad that are interested in storing the archive in the long term. "The idea is not to rush, but to be here for a long time and give all the people time," Opaz says. "Our assumption is that as time passes, and we see this, more and more people will want to tell, to give their testimony – and I am convinced that we will reach hundreds of testimonies from those events. A lot of people gathered here, with a lot of experience, to do it in a gentle, sensitive way, but also to leave this lesson we learned for future generations."
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