Edut 710: A Humanist Project
By Dr. Ohad Ofaz
Dedicated to the memory of Amos Epstein
Amos Epstein, one of the founders of Kfar Aza, was eighty-two years old when we recorded his testimony at the hotel for the displaced in Tel Aviv. With restraint he surveyed the events of the day on which his wife, his son-in-law, and two of his grandchildren were murdered; yet he was choked with tears when he described, with deep emotion, moments of human generosity: how they were cared for when they were evacuated from the burning kibbutz to the gas station at the nearby junction; how the grieving members of the family were received in a community in the center of the country; and how his young grandson rose early one morning to bring a gift to his friend, who had just returned from captivity.
Is it possible to continue to believe in human goodness after surviving such murderous hatred and violence?
This question has unsettled us ever since October 7, and in my view it is the question that led to the founding of Edut 710. Human love and faith in human goodness stand at the heart of the responsibility we have taken upon ourselves — to listen, to document the stories of those who survived the terror attack, and to carry their testimonies before the world. Questions of humanistic responsibility also stand at the center of our dilemmas and the disagreements among us. For instance: what is the right way to offer listening and documentation to people who have survived the abyss? When is it right to listen to them in silence, and when, and how, is it appropriate to put questions to them?
A Historical Perspective: Faith in Humanity After the Second World War
Seventy-eight years before the massacre of October 7, the question of faith in humanity and in human goodness confronted the American and British film units that arrived in the spring of 1945 at the concentration camps in Germany. The decision to document the stories of the survivors against the backdrop of the horror changed the face of cinema, which for the first time turned its focus away from the leaders and commanders of the war and toward its victims.
The Seventh Art: The Camera’s Lens in Pursuit of Humanity
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the filmmakers of Italian neorealism sought to enlist the seventh art in an attempt to decipher the human reality that had brought about the war, that had been trampled beneath it, and that remained wounded among its ruins. They formulated a cinematic manifesto — one that loves the human being — whose relevance to our own time is striking: “An endless exploration of the human being has opened before us. Not an abstract exploration, but a concrete one — concrete like the people who brought about the war and who endured it. It was a need to know, to see how such terrible events could have come to pass, and cinema was the most direct means for this… better than the other instruments of culture… this overwhelming desire of the cinema to see and to analyse… a kind of homage towards the other…” (Cesare Zavattini).
Responsibility for the Other, According to Levinas
In a different response to the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Second World War, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas sought to reset philo-sophy — “the love of wisdom” — which had failed to prevent, and in his view had even led to, the moral collapse. Levinas proposed to transform philosophy from the love of wisdom into a wisdom in the service of love — the love of one’s fellow human being. He did so in order that it might stand against the hatred that animated Nazism and that had brought about the murder of millions. He formulated a radical ethics in which “proximity” defines a total personal responsibility for the Other, and in which “justice” defines the obligation toward all others and toward humanity as a whole. In his writing, Levinas sought to create a bond between personal responsibility toward those near at hand and a universal human justice.
Can we think of our listening and of our responsibility to document the witnesses in terms of proximity? Can we see the effort to edit the testimonies and to make them accessible, to build an archive that will allow study, research, and creation, as acts of justice?
The Humanistic Struggle
Edut 710 was established as part of a broad civic and human movement that stood up for the survivors from the moment the first rumors of the massacre began to spread. The women and men of valor who rushed out at once to repel the terror attack, to rescue, and to assist; the initiatives that arose on the day after the massacre to take in and care for the survivors, to gather abandoned pets, or to harvest potatoes — all of these stand in one line with us in this humanistic struggle.
Documentation as Partnership
The arenas of media, documentation, and historical memory are the arenas in which we at Edut 710 took our stand against the waves of commercialization, polarization, and violence that flood our media and our culture. We understood that in documenting the words of survivors, of the displaced, and of those wounded by the war, there is no place for an intrusive microphone and camera that expect to extract a dramatic story and a tear within minutes and then to rush off to document the next disaster. While journalists and documentary filmmakers descended upon the centers for the displaced armed with cameras, we chose to turn with care to those who had been evacuated from the combat zone — without persuasion, without pressure to speak — out of the understanding that true humanism demands partnership.
An Ethics of Listening in Real Time
The ethics of Edut 710 carries forward the path of the psychiatrist and pioneering testimony-recorder Dori Laub, who formulated a documentary-therapeutic ethics that places upon the interviewer full responsibility for the emotional state of the survivor. According to Laub, the listener to trauma is “the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time,” and serves as an indispensable companion on the journey into an “unmapped land” that the survivor cannot traverse alone. The attentive testimony allows the survivor to gather the fragments of memory into a story and a lesson to be transmitted to society; yet this process demands “an intimate and total presence of an other in the position of the listener.” While Laub was addressing Holocaust survivors who had kept silent for decades, at Edut 710 the situation is entirely different: we are committed to editing, publishing, and archiving the testimonies in real time, so that already now the documentation may serve as an instrument in the struggle against repression, denial, and silencing. The choice to adopt Laub’s legacy of listening grants the witnesses ownership of the narrative — something critical to the processes of rehabilitation for individuals and communities that lost their world in a single day. In so doing, we shift the historical gaze away from a politics of leaders and commanders and toward the subjective experience of those who lived, who defended, and who fought back.
What the Media Struggles to Bear
Amos Epstein — who was among the leaders of the Israeli agricultural economy, among the pioneers of the northwestern Negev, and who lost four of those closest to him on October 7 — found attentive and patient documentation of his story only at Edut 710. Is this because there is no place in today’s media that can bear the testimony of an elderly man who speaks almost without voice, who shares his disaster with restraint, and who is moved most of all by the generosity of other people?
Edut 710: Returning the Media to the Human
I believe that at Edut 710 we are creating a kind of antidote to the destructive forces of the media and its instruments — to the culture that produces them and that takes shape from within them. This is a possibility of harnessing cameras, microphones, and screens in order to set in motion processes of social and cultural repair and rehabilitation. It is a possibility of looking into the faces of human beings, of listening to their pain, of demanding justice, of seeking consolation, of presenting human dignity, and of spreading faith in the good.
In loving memory of Amos Epstein
