Hours before the start of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, an estimated 1,500 Israelis came together in gatherings all across the country to pray for the people in Syria. Coordinated through a Facebook event, Israelis joined hands in prayer, music, and silent meditation in places such as Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, the Golan Heights, and Tekoa in the West Bank. They were united under the banner “The world is silent, we are not.”

“Hundreds of people, men, women and children, are slaughtered daily and the world is silent,” event organizer Shivi Froman, son of the late peace activist Rabbi Menachem Froman, told Walla News. He said that the pre-Yom Kippur grouping was “to cry out, to pray, to hope, to sing, to identify and to awaken the mercy of the world in general and about the suffering that is taking place here next to us.”

Froman also said the massacre in Syria gives him “deja-vu of the world’s silence about the Holocaust.”

Eli Malka, head of the Golan Regional Council, told Israel’s Channel 1 that the gatherings were a call to action. “We are neighbors with the Syrians, neighbors with the nation that sits here. We can’t remain silent. The world is silent, and we say, ‘stop, stop with this silence.’ We must act in order to stop the crisis happening on the other side.”

A video recording from a gathering in Jerusalem is embedded below.

Earlier this year, the Israeli government authorized the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syrians in need through the nations’ shared border. More than 2,000 Syrians have been treated in Israeli hospitals since 2013, even though the two countries have been in a state of war since Israel’s founding. Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai documented one of the risky missions the IDF undertook to rescue an injured Syrian fighter last year. Pregnant women sometimes travel to the border in order to deliver their babies in Israel, and two years ago Israeli doctors treated a young Syrian girl whose leg was shattered with a cutting-edge procedure that allowed her to walk again.

Aboud Dandachi, a Syrian refugee, has set up a website , Thank You Am Israel , to say “Thank you to the people of Israel and the Jewish people the world over, for showing kindness and charity to Syrians, whether it is through your IDF medical teams, your aid workers in Greece and the Balkans, or your congregations in North America raising money to aid and sponsor Syrian refugees.”

[Photo: Maitraiya Mitra Ehud Dray / Facebook ]