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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-jews-mourn-jewish-strangers/
Why Jews Mourn Jewish Strangers
(Times of Israel) Barry Finestone - When a Jewish person is killed thousands of miles away, Jews around the world often feel it as a personal loss. Not symbolically. Not intellectually. Personally. After the recent mass killing in Bondi, Jewish communities across continents gathered and mourned. Most of them have never been to Australia and did not know the victims. This reaction often puzzles people outside the Jewish community. Why would the death of a stranger feel so immediate? The answer reveals something fundamental about how Jews understand belonging, memory, and responsibility. Jews are very few. Roughly 15 million worldwide, less than two-tenths of one percent of the global population. When a people is that small, distance collapses. A stranger is never entirely a stranger. Someone knew their family, or prayed in the same language, or shares a lineage. It is what happens when you belong to a tiny people whose survival has never been guaranteed. But plenty of small groups do not react this way. The Jewish reaction is shaped by something more enduring. Jews carry history differently. For most peoples, violence against their group is episodic. For Jews, it is cumulative. Pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, massacres, and the Holocaust are read as a long, unfinished sentence. It means that the past is present tense. Jewish memory is not nostalgia. It is vigilance. It is pattern recognition shaped by centuries of experience. Moreover, Jews have a moral architecture that centers an ancient teaching that all Jews are responsible for one another. This is not just a saying. It is a demand. Historically, Jewish communities survived because they treated that responsibility as non-negotiable. Jewish life persisted through mutual accountability. Jewish identity is not just a religion you practice. It is a story you inherit and a future you feel obligated to protect. When tragedy strikes, it does not feel like news. It feels like something has happened to the family. The writer is President and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation, supporting Jewish education in the U.S.