Heartbreak and hope reporting on the October 7 beat

After 14 years of writing at The Post, I never considered myself to have any one beat — happily covering a wide cast of quirky New York characters and their hijinks that shape the city.

That changed two years ago Oct. 7, when I woke up in New York to learn that 100 Israelis — at that point — were murdered in a surprise terror attack unlike any the tiny country has witnessed.

I watched in horror as the death toll ticked upward, digesting the brutality’s scope.

In a moment of shock and helplessness, I did the only thing I felt could help me process the horrifying information: I started to report.

From that moment on, my beat has been Oct. 7.

That black Saturday certainly changed the face of Israel and the world, and as a reporter who’s Jewish, it changed me.

It became a two-year search to uncover the facts, along with the people behind the stories, both tragic and inspiring.

In the afternoon hours of that interminable first day, I finally connected with a former New Yorker turned kibbutznik along the Gaza border sending real-time messages to the world while hiding in her safe room.

She told me her son-in-law killed terrorists who invaded his home, saving her grandchildren’s lives.

Then I interviewed a New Yorker who’d just secured a midnight flight to Israel so he could voluntarily join his old Israel Defense Forces unit into the unknown — leaving behind his budding startup, lazy weekend brunches and the easy life.

“No one is expecting me to come,” he told me, but “my heart is in Israel — there’s no chance anything would stop me from coming back.”

While Israel was in fight-or-flight mode, so too were journalists covering the aftermath.

It’s been two years of wall-to-wall reporting on life in Israel and the antisemitism that burst like an earthquake with unabating aftershocks in the tragedy’s wake.

I interviewed Oct. 7 survivors who replayed details about how running in one direction over the other proved to be lifesaving, noting time can’t shake that unmistakable smell of death.

Their “second chance at life” now proudly includes pro-Israel advocacy.

I had painful conversations with hostage families going on faith in lieu of information.

Just as life was cruelly stolen, it also began anew, heartbreak mingled with miracles.

The widow of a school-bus driver who took his own life in the very bus he used to evacuate shell-shocked children from Kibbutz Be’eri opened up about the wrenching tragedy to honor Haim Ben Arye’s legacy. 

And the fiancée of a fallen IDF reservist who delivered a baby some 19 months after he was killed in Gaza confirms hope is always mandatory.

Holocaust survivors shared their fears of echoes of the 1930s, retraumatized and painfully reliving the horrors they thought they left behind.

Tsili Wenkert, who survived the dangerous Ukrainian ghetto and saw relatives murdered, told me, “The only thing that keeps me going is the hope I’m going to see him” — her hostage grandson, Omer Wenkert, who was released in February.

“God performed a miracle for me and now he needs to return all the kidnapped,” she told The Post last week.

I interviewed refugees — those forced to flee Israel after their beloved homes came under relentless assault from rockets, strangers in a strange land trying to make a new life for themselves in New York.

“I feel really guilty that I’m here,” Korin Katanov said after leaving her lifelong home of Sderot in southern Israel, under siege from rockets after the Jewish state’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. “I’m at the age that I’m supposed to go to the army and protect my country, and I’m here.”

And I talked to Americans who made the holy land their new home, including a lifelong New Yorker who said she sold all her belongings to fund the move because “in the midst of war-torn hell, Israel needs all of us right now.”

I’ve met severely injured soldiers visiting the Big Apple on sponsored medical trips, one after hobbling on one leg from a booby-trapped building in Gaza.

Yet the most pronounced feature is the smile on their faces reflecting the pride of their mission and country.

“I’m not going to sit at home and feel sorry for myself,” one said.

“We only have one homeland, and we’re going to defend it,” said another.

For the past two years in these pages, I’ve written about the New York Jewish community’s unity standing up to overwhelming hate — in school, at work, on the streets of their beloved city that’s turned on them.

They dutifully show up every Sunday in Central Park on behalf of the hostages trapped deep inside Hamas hell, chanting, “Let my people go.”

And they defiantly affix outsize Hanukkah decorations that are the talk of the town, declaring, “Let my people glow.”

Raif Rashed, a New York chef who survived the Nova music festival, where he manned a Druze food truck, opened a restaurant this spring where “healing is on the menu.”

And there’s Jamie, an Upper East Sider who triumphantly wore her solidarity on her sleeve, fashioning a custom-made black trench coat with vertical chains hanging photos of every hostage still in Gaza — the chain carrying “intentional symbolism.”

There have been endless stories of keffiyeh-clad bad actors hijacking school commencements and ripping hostage posters across the city, even including one Adams administration staffer caught on video viciously tearing down the poignant pictures that serve as a call to conscience.

I’ve seen the heartbreak of a 25-year-old Nova survivor who just finished telling her story suffer a panic attack when a mob armed with Hamas and Hezbollah flags descended on a downtown exhibit meant to memorialize the festival that saw so much bloodshed of young people in the prime of their lives.

“I was shocked. I thought, ‘How can this be happening again?’ ” she said, dismayed by the “intifada” outside.

Indeed, as the best and worst of humanity share a single grid, Jewish New Yorkers have palpable fears about their very safety in a city they say forgot them.

Even midday coffee runs risk unwanted attention, as some people disguise their Jewish-sounding names when they place their drink order after spiking antisemitism. 

My direct messages are flooded with tips no reporter wants to get: teens facing harassment in school because of their Jewish identity, medical professionals who don’t act very professionally writing “Long Live Hamas & Hezbollah” and hailing the perpetrators of the depraved Oct. 7 attacks that included rapes, burnings and beheadings as “noble resistance and freedom fighters.”

Yet the fortitude of a battered but unbroken people endures.

As one New Yorker shared with me on the first anniversary’s eve last year, that passage is taken to heart:

“The strange thing about all of this is that this has made me prouder to be Jewish,” said Amy Cook, who’s been called a “genocidal Nazi” for posting posters of the Americans Hamas kidnapped.

“Being targeted has oddly enough strengthened my connection to my faith and background.”

When fighting a common enemy feels like a battle of good versus evil — and justifying one’s right to live and defend a homeland happens 24/7 on the digital frontlines — The Post has run countless stories on humble heroes who sanctify the memory of 1,200 souls viciously taken Oct. 7.

Covering this beat has been tough — but it’s also been fulfilling.

I’ve met people with uncommon resolve and courage, seen heroism up close and watched resilience redefined. 

But sometimes a reporter needs to put her pen down.

And this Oct. 7, I will spend it commemorating the day as a proud Jew in New York.