The campaigner

l Dmitri Krasik had never put up a poster before October 7. Now, with the Bring Them Home Now posters, he is spearheading efforts to remind Londoners that Hamas still holds hostages in Gaza.

Dmitri says he “couldn’t sit at home knowing what happened”. Desperate to help, he found an online poster download and printed out a batch. He spent the next two weeks putting them up. “It was quite risky because I was doing it alone.”

Now Dmitri works with a group of volunteers, with all activity coordinated via Whats-App. “We’re part of the war effort here.”

As the posters have become more ubiquitous, Dmitri and the other volunteers have often been confronted with abuse.“Some people see the posters as propaganda. They don’t see the 14-year-old who has been taken hostage. They just see something Zionist.”

But Dmitri and the rest of the team are not perturbed. “It is not political. Women, children and civilians being taken hostage and killed should never be about what side you’re on.”

With a full-time job in software, some weeks, Dmitri spends all his spare time working on the campaign in London, coordinating poster distribution and planning demonstrations.

In one night, Dmitri helped to coordinate 20 teams across London, putting up 10,000 posters.

“The hostages aren’t like the Hamas leadership in Qatar. They cannot talk. We must talk for them and be a reminder to the world that these hostages are still there, and they need our help.”

 

Anecdotally, Dmitri says 20 to 30 per cent of passers-by are oblivious to the news and, for some, the posters are the first they have heard about the hostages.

The volunteers are sometimes joined by people who happen to walk past them while they are putting up posters. Recently, a French family visiting London joined Dmitri, spending a day of their holiday with the team.

Another time, a Russian couple asked Dmitri why they weren’t putting up posters of Palestinian children. When the volunteers explained that they were looking after people who felt like their own family in Israel, the couple started to understand, says Dmitri.

“We thought a lot about what our message is. To our allies, we thank them for stopping and looking. To the ones that are against us, we’re not going to engage with them because we don’t want a screaming match. But if they’re in the middle, we’ll talk to them, ask them questions and get them to think about new things.”

The team is changing hearts and minds and their efforts have gone viral. But beyond that, the team has become a group of friends, sharing in a collective grief over what happened on October 7 and the need to do something to help.

The collector

l Just days after October 7, Alyson Martin was already collecting goods in her London driveway. It was only natural for the woman who has a reputation for helping those in need.

This time, it wasn’t for Ukraine or Afghanistan, but for Israel.

Alyson says: “We couldn’t be there, but we wanted to help.”

She soon discovered that displaced citizens urgently needed towels and bedding and, before long, her driveway was bulging with boxes.

“Everything had to be new, so we set up an Amazon gift list. People went out and bought kids’ duvets and sleeping bags. We had hundreds of donations. We did it all via word of mouth. School WhatsApp groups are amazing.”

With the help of a volunteer who came to the rescue with a 40ft lorry, Alyson filled a shipping container with £110,000 worth of items collected on her driveway.

“The whole community came together,” says Alyson, who sent the shipping container off to Haifa.

Soon after Alyson’s collection, her friend Lara Akka had the idea to mobilise those in the entertainment industry. Neasden Studios in north-west London was offered up as a space to host a packing day.

Alyson enlisted the help of a committee, who arranged talks from those impacted by the war. Pizza ovens were brought in to feed the packers and entertainment for children was arranged, which meant whole families could join in with the mammoth boxing up.

“Over 250 people came to pack 1100 boxes. It was a community event. Some were just going to stay for an hour, but they ended up spending the day with us.”

“Logistically, it was quite militaristic. We had to pack things into different boxes. Clothing was separated by age, gender, and size.”

As well as packing up clothes, volunteers wrote letters to IDF soldiers and filmed supportive videos.

Packers heard from the mother of a British IDF soldier, and several social media influencers. Alyson says it allowed volunteers “to bear witness”.

With one shipping container already in Israel helping those in need and another one on its way, Alyson’s collecting will continue.

The war is “constant and heartbreaking” but, says Alyson, the collections are “our way of helping and coming together. It is amazing how Jewish people get together in times of need.”

The educator

Mothers Dana Brass and Lauren Breslauer were both alarmed by how much misinformation children were coming across online and how this was fuelling antisemitism.

Their organisation, I-gnite, seeks to “empower students, parents and teachers with knowledge to express their Jewish identity and relationship with Israel”.

Lauren established I-gnite in 2021, with Dana joining soon after, following an outbreak of violence in Gaza and the subsequent increase in antisemitism, particularly on campus.

In September this year, I-gnite launched a project with PaJeS Partnership for Jewish Schools to provide students with a combination of factual knowledge and critical-thinking skills to increase their engagement with Israel.

Nothing could have prepared Dana for the uptake in demand that would follow October 7.

The Hamas attack was a “wake up call”, Dana says, which “thrust us all into a misinformation war”.

“Many of us were realising we didn’t know the basic facts about Israel and its relationship with the Jewish people. All of us were having difficult conversations without the knowledge we needed.”

The website is curated by a small team of volunteers and signposts people to pre-existing material as well as material developed by I-gnite.

Dana says that the team “leveraged their experience and created an education hub with the basics, covering the conflict and antisemitism. After that, people were asking for more. They wanted information on the big questions, including how to have conversations about the accusations levelled at Israel such as colonialism, genocide and occupation.”

Dana wants to give people a “toolkit” to have these conversations. “The aim is to empower people with knowledge.”

I-gnite also brings thousands of young people together on webinars, “each one getting to the heart of a different issue”.

Dana thinks “young people have an important role to play in telling the Jewish story — telling our own story.”

“There is a glimmer of opportunity in these dark days for young people to reengage with their history and identity.”

https://i-gnite.org