A new crop of bumper stickers has appeared in Israel over the last year, pasted on cars and lampposts, plastered on the back walls of train stations and bus depots, naming and commemorating victims and soldiers who were killed in the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught and the ongoing war.
The decals aren’t printed by a single organization, but are produced independently by family and friends of those killed on and after October 7, just one of the many ways they try to keep their loved ones’ memory alive.
When Jeffrey Weiss began seeing the stickers, he quickly realized that he was witnessing something of a phenomenon, and started taking photos of each new sticker he saw.
Now he’s created Stickers of Meaning, a website featuring the stickers with a brief biography of each person in Hebrew and English.
“I would expect in any country to see respect for soldiers who died in combat — that seems normal and universal,” said Weiss, a lawyer who immigrated to Israel from Washington, DC. “But there was this additional feature on each one, a sentence that offered a kind of advice to the living.”
The messages were moving and powerful, said Weiss. One, for a soldier, told of how he fought out of love for those behind him rather than hatred for those in front of him. Another, for a woman killed at the Nova music festival, told readers that she came to each place with optimism.
He noted the Jewish and Israeli tone inherent in the gestures, as the bumper stickers often reimagined classic Jewish phrases such as, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and, “Love those like you, even those not like you,” or, “You ran after justice and peace, but preferred love.”
Israelis are no strangers to slapping politically or theologically loaded messages on bumper stickers, from exhortations on God’s oneness to demands regarding settlement expansion. In 2004, before the decals began to fade from boards and bumpers in favor of Facebook walls and Twitter, the phenomenon was famously recorded by author David Grossman and set to music by rock band Hadag Nahash.
Sometime after October 7, the stickers made a heartbreaking comeback. Stickers with images of the fallen began appearing throughout the country, hundreds grouped on walls of bus stations and train stations, as well as in other public places, including the site of the Nova rave and Tkuma, where hundreds of the ruined cars driven by those trying to escape the terrorists are piled high in another kind of memorial site.
At some point, after taking photos of some 400 stickers, Weiss, a patent lawyer by trade, began categorizing the stickers, organizing them according to types and messages.
He felt that a website featuring every sticker would emphasize the size and breadth of the ad-hoc national memorial and the power of a simple sticker.
Weiss wasn’t in Israel on October 7. He had flown to the United States on October 4 to visit his four adult children ahead of a 72-mile ultra marathon he planned to run on October 14 around Lake Tahoe, an endeavor for which he had been training for months.
Given his lifelong love for Israel and recent immigration to Tel Aviv in 2022, Weiss felt terrible being out of the country in the aftermath of the massacre, which saw some 1,200 people brutally murdered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. Once he was back several days after the race, he began volunteering with various initiatives, seeking a way to help ease the terrible anguish, pain, and suffering plaguing so many in Israel.
At some point, he noticed the stickers and was struck by messages similar in tone to the sayings from the world of extreme endurance sports that he had enveloped himself in for the race.
“They all talk about life that is joyful and daring, full of meaning and purpose and resilience,” Weiss said.
Weiss set out to organize the Stickers of Meaning website according to categories. He hired web developers and lawyers to help him, aiming to contact each family and ensure that each one agreed to have the sticker featured on the website.
His team has met with some of the families and heard more stories about the loved ones they are mourning.
One family told Weiss and his team that the quote on the sticker had been written on the inside of the door to their son’s room. He was determined to join an elite IDF unit and had trained for the role since he was 16, crawling through dunes in the dark.
Another sibling had tattooed her brother’s favorite saying, “Be happy in your life,” on her arm and wore the saying on a bracelet before having it printed on the bumper sticker.
“I’ve been so struck by how Israelis really do seem drawn to all sorts of stuff about living their best life,” said Weiss. “It wasn’t just soldiers in elite units, but victims of the Nova and other places on October 7. There’s this persistence in the need to be joyful and optimistic and lead life to the fullest. There’s not anger in these stickers, there’s always something positive.”
Weiss launched the site the week before October 7 and is thinking about writing a book expanding on the meanings behind individual stickers and messages.
One of the bereaved families is considering launching an educational program for high schools and post-high school programs based on the sticker messages.
“It’s easier during this period to focus on what’s hard and painful. You can easily spend all your days in anguish,” said Weiss. “What these stickers did is reveal something astonishing about the character of Israelis that is so impressive.”