I was dismayed to read in Veronica Darmon’s guest column, “Council resolution sows further division,” [Gazette, Oct. 2] that when an Israeli-American in the audience at the recent Northampton City Council meeting relayed her traumatic experience of the October 7th massacre, she was met with sneers and someone shouted, “that’s not true.” I write to say that I saw the excruciating evidence.

In August, I attended the Hadassah conference in Miami. There, I met Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie, a professor of prosthodontics at Hadassah-Hebrew University Dental School. When Doctor Sharon-Sagie is not rebuilding faces, she volunteers with Israel Police’s forensic odontology victim identification unit. Dr. Sharon-Sagie helped identify the 1,200 murdered bodies from the October 7th massacre. Her presentation of the methodologies required to recover the forensic evidence to match with medical records of victims included slides with horrifying images: the collected bodies in different states — fresh, decomposed, skeletal, burned and charred. Some bodies were decapitated while for others only heads were recovered. Some bodies were so mutilated that their genders could not be immediately ascertained. Archeologists were shown sifting through bodily ashes to locate teeth so Dr. Sharon-Sagie and others could identify the bodies. Dr. Sharon-Sagie was the first to identify the body of terrorist Yahya Sinwar from a CT scan taken when he was a prisoner so that a benign brain tumor could be removed by an Israeli surgeon.

I agree that BDS is “antithetical to peace, common ground, and coexistence.” Coexistence is an essential feature of health care in Israel. Israel’s diverse and collaborative medical system serves as a model of shared society to emulate. Non-Jewish Israelis are playing crucial roles in the medical field throughout Israel. Though Arabs are about 22% of the population, Arabs make up 25% of Israeli physicians; 27% of Israeli nurses; 27% of Israeli dentists; and 49% of Israeli pharmacists. Hadassah hospitals, which were nominated for a Nobel peace prize in 2005, have a diverse professional staff and serve patients without regard to nationality, religion, or ethnicity.

I join Veronica Darmon in “speak(ing) out antisemitism when it appears in this community.”

Rachel Vigderman

Amherst