There is a sign outside a cafe in my town, a bright yellow poster board with laminated sheets of 11×17 paper counting the days of captivity of 48 hostages, living and dead, in Gaza. Yesterday, it read 730. Today, it reads 731. And tomorrow, barring a miracle, it will read 732. 

There is hope in Israel that the ceasefire proposal put forward last week by President Donald Trump will soon render these signs unnecessary, but as multiple hostage families have said since the plan was announced, they’ll believe it when they’re hugging their loved ones or giving them a proper burial, and not a moment sooner. 

And even when the numbers stop going up, we’ll still be left with the fact that two years ago tomorrow, all of Israel’s best-laid national security plans came crashing down with the steel fence separating the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. 

We’ll still be left with the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, with the wholesale slaughter of some 1,200 people, the injury — physical and mental — of thousands, the destruction of entire communities, some of which have not yet been fully reconstructed, and the kidnapping of more than 250 people, at least 20 of whom are still, somehow, believed to have survived these past 731 days.

The Oct. 7 attacks have fundamentally reshaped the world in general, the Middle East, the State of Israel and the Jewish People in ways that we can not yet fully foresee. 

In Israel, beyond the massive, immediate tragedies that befell entire families and communities, the government’s inability to predict, prevent and appropriately respond to the attacks have worsened an existing crisis of public confidence in the state. 

In the wake of the attacks, Israel launched an initially supported but increasingly divisive war against Hamas in Gaza, which continues today, albeit at a more subdued level amid ceasefire talks. A year ago, Israel launched a full-scale offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon in light of its regular, deadly attacks on northern Israel, leading to regime change in neighboring Syria. And earlier this year, it launched a war against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, significantly setting them back. These repeated blows to the Iran-allied axis in the Middle East have created new diplomatic opportunities for Israel, while its increasingly unpopular war in Gaza presents fresh challenges. Long pushed to the side, the two-state solution is again being hotly debated in light of growing international recognition of a Palestinian state and Israeli threats to annex the West Bank. 

In the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, Jewish communities around the world were shocked to find that instead of abject horror, many of their supposed allies — among them, other minority groups, human rights leaders, academics and cultural figures — expressing support, justification or indifference to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The past two years have seen an explosion of antisemitic incidents around the world, including several deadly attacks — most recently in Manchester, England. While much of the focus over the past two years has been on left-wing and Islamist antisemitism, which were behind much of this growth, there is also concern on the right from influential antisemitic figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

The shock of the attacks prompted an ongoing but waning “Surge” of increased Jewish engagement and the rise of so-called “Oct. 8 Jews,” as well as a mirror image phenomenon of people hiding their Jewish identities and breaking ties with the Jewish community over Israel. 

We know that the Jewish philanthropy world responded profoundly to the Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath. Though there has yet to be a comprehensive, definitive accounting of the funds sent to Israel post-Oct. 7, a rough back-of-the-envelope tally shows that they easily exceeded $2 billion and likely surpassed $3 billion. Even a cursory glance at the 990 forms of the various fundraising vehicles for Israeli organizations connected in some way to the Oct. 7 attacks and Israeli civil society’s response to them shows the massive increase in financial support that they received compared to previous years, in some cases several times higher. 

The lion’s share of these donations went to the Jewish Federations of North America’s Israel Emergency Fund — now known as its Rebuild Israel fund — which raised $500 million within three weeks of the attacks and now stands at roughly $900 million, most of which has been allocated to hundreds of Israeli nonprofits and communities. In 2023 and 2024, PEF Israel Endowment Funds Inc. raised more than $250 million, far more than in the preceding years. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces raised more than $280 million in 2023, more than three times more than it did in 2022, as did American Friends of Magen David Adom (nearly six times more than in 2022) and American Friends of Bar-Ilan University (though that was due to a $260 million gift that was not necessarily tied to the Oct. 7 attacks). There have also been multiple nine-figure donations made to Israeli institutions post-Oct. 7, including Sylvan Adams’ $100 million gift to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Jon and Mindy Gray’s $125 million gift to Tel Aviv University and Shmuel and Anat Harlap’s recent $180 million donation to Rabin Medical Center, along with numerous seven- and eight-figure donations.

Notably, this rise in giving to Israeli causes was not uniform; organizations not seen as connected to the Oct. 7 attacks or the recovery effort, particularly cultural institutions, have seen a marked drop in donations. A similar situation has played out in the United States, with groups focused on combating antisemitism and strengthening Jewish identity getting a boost while others saw grants drop off. 

But while the fundraising figures that have so far been disclosed and other anecdotal information show us what has happened over the past two years, we do not know what comes next. Does the “Surge” in philanthropic giving mark the start of increased donations to Jewish and Israeli causes? Or was it a one-off event, an outlier data point amid a wider trend of disaffiliation and disconnection? 

The answer matters not only as an indicator of the strength of Jewish identity and the Israel-Diaspora connection, but also in practical terms. While the renewed diplomatic push may spell an end to the war in Gaza, long after the guns stop firing, the increased needs of Israeli society will remain. Yet as we have regularly discussed in these pages, Israeli social services are not expected to receive the government funding that they need to address these greater needs, leaving philanthropy to fill in the gaps — or not.