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Award-winning Israeli photojournalist Ziv Koren has covered earthquakes in Haiti, Nepal and Turkey, a tsunami in Southeast Asia, the war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic in Israel and many other humanitarian crises. So on the morning of Oct, 7, as news of the Hamas assault on southern Israel began to reach a stunned world, he responded instinctively.

Grabbing his equipment, he jumped on his motorcycle and sped from Tel Aviv toward the sites of the attacks, some still under fire. He was one of the first photographers to document that unspeakable day.

Nothing in his personal or professional life up to that point prepared Koren for what he encountered, according to the text that accompanies an exhibit of his photos that will be displayed at Oct. 7 commemorations in the Bay Area.

An entire parking lot of burned-out cars in the desert where the Nova music festival was ambushed. The candy colors of a child’s toy outside a kibbutz home exploded into sepia shards. Bloody handprints on an interior wall.

A collection of his images have been on display for months at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa, and a book, “The October 7 War,” has just been published in Israel. 

A total of 28 large-format photographs comprise the exhibit coming to the Bay Area, one of many places where Israeli consulates are sponsoring displays of Koren’s work. The images testify to the murder and abduction of Israelis and foreign nationals, the unimaginable horrors encountered by responding Israeli soldiers, the destroyed kibbutzim and towns in the south, and the ongoing bereavement of the families and friends of the hostages.

His exhibition aims to memorialize and preserve the memory of “the greatest disaster that has ever occurred in the State of Israel,” according to Koren.

“I think that every Israeli and every Jew all over the world should see them,” said Maya Avishai, deputy consul at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. “Sometimes I feel like people forget; they look back at this year and this war and can’t remember what started it all. So we would like to remind them what happened on Oct. 7.”

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The exhibit will be on display on Oct. 7, divided between community commemorations at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco and the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. (Other organizations interested in hosting the show can contact the Israeli Consulate.)

 “We were trying to think of what sort of extra programming we could offer to the service that would be intentional and meaningful,” Emanu-El programs director Alexa Asher told J. “The Consulate told us about this photo exhibit, and that is exactly what it is.”

The invitation to the “Evening of Remembrance and Hope” at the OFJCC cautions that the event “will include difficult readings and videos that may be upsetting for some people” and, indeed, Koren’s photos might fit that description too.

“I think that the reality is disturbing, not the photos,” Avishai said. “After all, this is our reality, something that happened, something that happened to us. And we need to look at these pictures.” 

“Ziv Koren: October 7” 

On display starting at 6:15 p.m. Oct. 7 before the 7 p.m. communitywide Yikzkor Memorial Service at Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake Street, S.F.; and at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 during the communitywide “Evening of Remembrance and Hope” at the Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. Free, registration required.