1. Returned hostage Alon Ohel played the piano dedicated to him in Hostages Square.
2. On the day the hostages were released, spinning classes in Jerusalem cycle to the rhythm of the Breslov Hassidic song “(God) Always Loves Me.”
3. At a Greek kosher restaurant in Jerusalem, a young woman is dancing Sirtaki with an M4 carbine on her shoulder. She was on furlough from the Iron Dome service.
4. We not only invented the cellphone. We have the Iron Dome and David’s Sling to protect us.
5. The Iron Beam harnesses lasers to destroy incoming missiles, rockets, mortars, UAVs, and aircraft.
6. According to the website pickles.co.il, computerized video cameras are scanning Israeli olives on each side, one at a time, to achieve a high level of sorting.
7. The pickle capital of Israel is a religious kibbutz called Kvutzat Yavne, founded in 1941. Before pickles, they produced fried potatoes and canned meat for the British Army.
8. Newbie Team Israel won a gold and two silver medals in the 2025 Pickleball World Cup in Florida, defeating the reigning champion in Puerto Rico.
9. The Bamba factory in Kiryat Gat is a top tourist destination for Israel and Jewish day school students from abroad.
10. Bamba, whose name sounds like baby talk and melts in the mouth, was invented in 1964. Studies show that due to extensive consumption of Bamba by infants, peanut allergy is rare among Israelis. New Bamba is filled with halva and may conquer sesame allergies, too.
11. There’s an app to find the closest bomb shelter.
12. In a friend’s neighborhood bomb shelter, someone opened a grocery store to make shopping more convenient. You can get pickles and Bamba there, too.
13. Before Passover, one shelter had a matzah bake.
14. Israel Radio announcements: “If you are having trouble hearing the news in your safe room, try our new shelter-friendly app.”
15. Yoga anyone? Tel Aviv shelters offer classes and disco parties. Am Yisrael chai!
16. Meet your match. Hooked, a location-based dating app developed by Noa Barzani and Roi Revach, lets singles scan QR codes and find a partner in the same bomb shelter.
17. Conveniently, Israelis held weddings in shelters, too. No need to heed the siren under the huppah (canopy used at Jewish weddings).
18. No modern shelter? In the Old City of Jerusalem, residents and tourists use ancient cisterns.
19. In 2025, Israel achieved its best-ever performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Australia, ranking 6th out of 110 nations, with four gold medals, one silver, and one bronze. All six high school team members won medals, placing Israel among the top performers globally.
20. European Girls’ Math Olympiad (EGMO): In April 2025, Israeli female students won two gold medals and two honorable mentions, competing against 56 countries.
21. Within an hour of the Bondi Beach mass shooting, Hadassah Hospital psychologists were sharing trauma treatment knowledge with the Australian Jewish community.
22. Prof. Esi Sharon-Sagie, who volunteered for the Dental Forensic Identification unit throughout the Gaza war, identified hundreds of victims in Gaza and also arch-enemy Yahya Sinwar. She went into Gaza to identify the final deceased hostage, Ran Gvili. Sharon-Sagie is now the worldwide expert lecturing to Interpol. She was named one of the 100 people positively influencing Jewish life by The Algemeiner newspaper.
23. The Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem celebrated the birth of an endangered Persian deer. The zoo staff often stay at night to keep animals safe and calm when there are sirens and rockets.
24. Stav Koren, 26, from Beersheba won the Tuff N Uff bantamweight title, making history as the first Israeli to win a mixed martial arts championship belt in that competition. He weighs only 66.7 kilograms. His nickname is “The Red Head.”
25. The nickname of the Israel men’s national basketball team is “The Mensch.”
26. Team Israel won the gold medal in wheelchair basketball in the Invictus Games in Vancouver. 62-7 over the United States!
27. Israeli Olympic gold medalist Artem Dolgopyat, born in the impossible-to-spell city of Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, won the gold in floor exercises at the Artistic Gymnastics World Cup in Germany in February, and another gold in Croatia in April, where he was joined as “Hatikva” was played by Noam Berkovich, who won bronze. (Last year, Indonesia refused to give Dolgopyat a visa to compete at the World Championships.)
28. Kickboxer Yulia Sachkov won gold at the World Championship in Abu Dhabi. She was born weighing 900 grams, but maybe came out kicking. Team Israel brought home seven medals.
29. Israel leads in water tech start-ups, which include smart irrigation systems, leak detection, and efficient desalination.
30. Per capita, Israelis use far less electricity and between a third to half of the water that Americans use.
31. Water everywhere. The new Gordonia Hotel in Zichron Ya’acov, named for Zionist leader A.D. Gordon, has a 70-meter swimming pool and a Watergen drinking faucet that pulls water out of the air.
32. The Gordonia Hotel opened for the first time while the airports were closed and in the midst of Operation Roaring Lion and the ongoing battle with Hezbollah.
33. Our soldiers, including my children and grandchildren, are still showing up at every battle front.
34. Israel has four different beaches – the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, and the Sea of Galilee – and is small enough so you can swim at all four in a single day.
35. Our beach volleyball team took third place in the Goa India Beach Pro Challenge in March when the temperature was 38 degrees and humid.
36. The nation comes to a two-minute standstill on Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day and on Memorial Day.
37. Two million persons have listened to Holocaust survivor stories in small groups in private homes in the Zikaron BaSalon (“A memory in the living room”) program in the last 15 years.
38. The names of Holocaust victims are read aloud in the Knesset in the Unto Every Person There Is a Name program.
39. President Isaac Herzog read the names of his own relatives killed in the Holocaust.
Memory, resilience, and achievement
40. Joel Mokyr was the 18th Israeli to win a Nobel Prize. S.Y. Agnon was the first. Mokyr won for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. Mokyr was born in Leiden, Netherlands, in 1946 to a family of Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust. His widowed mother, Gonda Jacobs Mok, brought him up in Haifa.
41. Even amid our wars, we’re still in this year’s top 10 list of happiest countries in the world.
42. Israelis under the age of 25, which includes our drafted fighting forces, ranked as the happiest group within the country and placed third worldwide.
43. Israel ranks 4th among OECD nations in longevity, with an average lifespan of 83.8.
44. Israel ranks second among OECD countries for the lowest mortality rate from preventable causes.
45. 81% of Israelis receive critical cardiac catheterization within 12 hours.
46. We have a public health system, and everything is covered, including fertility and cancer treatment.
47. Israelis have invented an app for when you can take a shower during the war.
48. Most baby booms happen after a war. Israel has a baby boom during a war, with a 7% to 10% growth rate in births.
49. Hadassah Mount Scopus chief midwife Elisheva Levin remarks: “The glorious cries of the newborns drown out the sound of the missiles.”
50. Despite the economic challenge, purchases of baby equipment have risen sharply.
51. Still Start-Up Nation. Despite the war, Israeli hi-tech companies raised $15.6 billion in 2025, with major global companies expanding their presence in Israel.
52. The tech sector remains 20% of GDP and over half of exports, showing extraordinary resilience.
53. Israel ranked 14th in the Global Innovation Index 2025 and 1st in its region, continuing to excel in research, patents, and hi-tech innovation.
54. Israel and the United States launched a $200 million AI and quantum technology center, aimed at global technological leadership and regional cooperation.
55. No surprise here. Israel’s defense tech sector surged in 2025, becoming a major strategic asset and integrating AI and new technologies rapidly into real-world use.
56. Israel ranked 3rd globally in energy innovation, according to the World Economic Forum.
57. Hadassah’s retired surgeon Avi Rivkind won a lifetime achievement Israel Prize. He fought to bring the first trauma center to Israel and also initiated a program to teach teens to drive safely by showing them the results of accidents.
58. The young owner of a tire company in Jerusalem gave me his home cellphone number to call him if I ever get stuck again while driving at night.
59. New Purim costumes: People in bathrobes caught showering while missiles fell.
60. El Al and other Israeli airlines dodge rockets to bring back Israelis while missiles are falling in their hometowns.
61. If they can’t get on a flight to Ben-Gurion Airport, Israelis find ways to come home via Egypt and Jordan.
62. Hospitals move patients underground into parking lots and all safe areas and continue to care for everyone.
63. While the enemy builds attack tunnels, we build underground emergency rooms.
64. Priorities: Passover Dungeons and Dragons camp continues despite the war.
65. It’s time for a love song, after two years of war-related Eurovision entries. Upbeat song “Michelle,” performed by Noam Bettan, gets early high betting.
66. “Catbam,” a popular song of the war about spotting enemy drones, becomes a national hit. Only in Israel.
67. “Catbam” was written by an 11-year-old boy, Nir Krigel, from Moshav Zvi in the Gilboa area.
68. Nir actually wrote “Catbam” for the previous war with Iran. His parents treated him to a session in a professional recording studio for his birthday. When Operation Roaring Lion started, his sister Adi uploaded it to TikTok.
69. Israeli military and hospitals developed AI-assisted triage tools to help prioritize treatment in mass casualty situations.
70. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has been included on the list of the world’s top 100 most visited art museums of the past year.
71. We have prayers in synagogues for our soldiers, of course, but now also for American soldiers joining us in battle.
72. The road from Jerusalem is lined with flags: Israeli flags, and American red, white, and blue to honor our allies.
73. With the threat of a war starting, on February 27, the day before the war began, the Tel Aviv Marathon resumed with a record number of runners.
74. Nothing kept Tel Aviv café goers from their favorite cappuccinos and matcha among missile attacks.
75. Some of our street mendicants now accept bank phone money transfer by BIT.
76. An ice cream truck on Passover boasts dairy and parve ice cream with and without kitniyot.
77. In 2025, archaeologists uncovered a rare First Temple period structure in Jerusalem, a Second Temple stone vessel workshop, and a coin from the Great Revolt against Rome.
78. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:When the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps looks up, says Hegseth, they only see two things on the sides of aircraft –“the Stars and Stripes, and the Star of David – the evil regime’s worst nightmare.”■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, co-written with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.