JNS
Rabbi Noah Farkas, who leads the city’s Federation, told JNS that there was a “collective sense of relief,” as the symbol was retired after Israel liberated the last hostage from Gaza.
Removing a wall-sized yellow ribbon from display on the west side of the building of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon after Israel liberated the final hostage from Gaza, Ran Gvili, came with a cocktail of emotions: solace and joy but also concern about the future.
“Now that his body has been recovered and brought back and buried in Israel, we’re just really proud to have arrived at this day,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Federation, told JNS, after he removed part of the ribbon.
The rabbi told JNS that the Jewish community is feeling “excitement” and a “collective sense of relief” as well as “trepidation,” as the heavy vinyl ribbon was retired.
“We don’t know what the world we’re returning to looks like,” he said. “But I can assure you that our Federation is there to take whatever action’s necessary to help the Jewish community.”
The Federation installed the ribbon more than a year ago to mark the one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.
When news broke of the redemption of Gvili’s body, “work kind of stopped for a few minutes” at the Federation due to the “powerful” moment, Farkas told JNS at the Federation’s office after the ceremony retiring the ribbon.
He and his colleagues feel that their work helping Israeli victims, reservist families, hospitals, students and others, and fighting Jew-hatred domestically in the city, has made a difference over the past two years.
“We feel that it’s not only something we said or a symbol of speech, but really a call to action,” Farkas told JNS.
Daniel Gryczman, who became board chair of the Federation on Jan. 1, told JNS that the ribbon’s retirement was a “bittersweet moment.”
“Certainly, it’s a moment of profound relief where we don’t have a hostage in Gaza with the return of Ran Gvili this last week for the first time since 2014,” he said. “But obviously, it’s also a reminder of the enormous human cost to the Jewish people and to others as well.”
Many Jews in the city feared wearing Stars of David, kippot or dog tags calling for the return of the hostages, according to Farkas.
“For those people who were afraid to wear a yellow ribbon to work, they could drive by our building on their way to work and realize we have one covered for you, for the whole city,” he told JNS.
On the first anniversary of Oct. 7, in 2024, the Federation held a citywide memorial. “We still had over 100 hostages in Gaza, Hezbollah was still threatening Israel, there were still rockets coming from Gaza and there were rockets coming from Yemen,” he said. “It didn’t feel like there was a future in sight.”
“We also felt that the world had already begun to forget what happened to Israel and to our friends and family,” he said.
Farkas said that he and Rob Goldenberg, chief creative officer at the Federation, thought that there wasn’t enough attention paid to the hostages at the time. “We said, ‘What can we do that’s big?’” Farkas told JNS.
Goldenberg showed him a drawing of the building with a ribbon on it. Farkas asked for a bigger ribbon. It came to span an entire side of the building, Farkas told JNS.
The original display on the building was 10 stories high and stated “LA remembers Oct. 7,” with the ribbon representing the “A.”
“About a few weeks after, we decided to take the ‘L’ down and the ‘Oct. 7’ down just to leave the ribbon,” Farkas told JNS. The ribbon that remained spanned some five and a half stories, he said.
Farkas thinks that the Federation’s ribbon display was the largest outside of Israel, where a larger one was projected on the air traffic control tower at Ben Gurion Airport.
“That one was quite a bit larger than ours,” he said. “But ours is physical.”
The Federation received “tremendous” feedback from the community when the ribbon went up, according to Farkas.
“We would have people drive by and email us saying, ‘I just drove by and saw the ribbon,’” he said. “We were on the news at one point and they saw it and they were just so elated.”
The Federation never received “direct hate” over the ribbon, according to Farkas.
“The more proud you are of who you are and the more centered you are in your identity, the bullies don’t like going after those people,” he said.
With a ribbon of that scale, “no one’s really messing with us, because they see that’s a pretty solid statement that we’re not backing down,” Farkas told JNS.
“The ribbon stood as a mark for our entire—not only Jewish community, but Los Angeles community that our Federation stood for the hostages, stood for what’s right,” Gryczman told JNS.
“We showed up and we did not allow, really, the terrible travesty of these hostages to be forgotten or to pass into silence,” he said. “That ribbon was really sort of a collective voice for all of us, for the values that we believe in as Jews and as a Jewish community.”
The ribbon coming down “represents a significant change relative to the facts on the ground,” he added. “It doesn’t change how we feel. It doesn’t change our responsibility to each other. It doesn’t change the fact that we will continue to work, as a Los Angeles Jewish community, on supporting our brothers and sisters in Israel.”
