Members of the Jewish community from Washington, D.C, Maryland and Virginia filled the Anthem, a southwest D.C. concert venue, on Monday night for an event commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

The crowd, which organizers said exceeded 3,000 in-person attendees with thousands more tuning in online, heard from a range of speakers, including Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog, two Jewish students from The George Washington University, a student poet from the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, author Sarah Hurwitz and local Jewish leaders. The group also joined together in song and prayer.

The event was organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, alongside the Washington Board of Rabbis and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.

Herzog, to applause from the audience, said that Israel has significantly degraded Hamas’ capabilities and is currently going after Hezbollah’s capabilities, with the goal of “denying them the ability to invade Israel … and we are weakening the whole [Iranian] axis.”

Herzog added that Arab leaders are privately congratulating him and Israel for going after Iran and its proxies.

Dekel-Chen, delivering a markedly less inflammatory speech than he did at another event earlier in the day, spoke primarily about his son and their family.

“Military action alone cannot free our loved ones,” Dekel-Chen said. “Every additional hour without an agreement is an hour stolen from the lives of the hostages and from their families.”

“The urgency of the moment cannot be overstated or answered solely with prayer,” he continued. “The hostages are dying. The murdered hostages in shallow graves in Gaza may be lost forever if they are not returned quickly. We cannot allow another day of torture, rape, starvation, sickness and the threat of death hovering over the hostages.”

Dekel-Chen added that Israel is strongest when it works “in harmony and in common interest with the United States.”

Tamar Todd, an American-Israeli George Washington University senior, said that the past year had been “the worst year of my life. It was the first time that I felt my personal safety and my very existence challenged by peers in my classes, by friends I had over for dinner and by childhood playmates who I used to have sleepovers with.”

Both Todd and GW sophomore Sam Loiterstein, who spoke alongside her, described being ostracized and excluded, shunned by friends and feeling alone and vulnerable on their campus.

“I wanted to feel strong and be a shoulder for others to lean on, but I struggled to embody my Jewish identity as a source of my strength, not an obstacle, definitely not a burden,” Loiterstein said.

But both said they’d found new friends and new hope by connecting more closely with the Jewish community on campus, in addition to finding allies beyond the Jewish community.

Hurwitz, an author and former White House speechwriter, said she’s been struck by the hope, positivity and resilience of the Jewish community both in the U.S. and in Israel since the Oct. 7 attack, even as it mourns and grapples with significant difficulties and obstacles.

“We carry our grief with us, but we move forward in hope,” Hurwitz said. “And that, I think, is why we are all still here, still uttering the same prayers we offered in our ancient temple in Jerusalem, 2,000 years after it was destroyed.”