2025 Through the Eyes of a Modern-Day Esther

It is not lost on us that 2025 began with a terror attack on Jews in Australia and ended with one.

In January, a Jewish childcare center in Sydney was set on fire and defaced with antisemitic graffiti. It was not a random act. It was part of a pattern of attacks on Jewish sites in the city since the war in Gaza began. Tiny classrooms and play areas suddenly belonged to a crime scene because the children who used them were Jewish. This was not Europe in the 1930s and it was not Israel in the middle of a war. This was Australia. And it was a picture of Jew-hatred rising in ways many thought belonged to another century.

In the same month, we watched something that felt like a miracle. Hostages who had been dragged through the streets and tunnels of Gaza on October 7 began to come home. We saw Romi, Doron, Emily and others step out of Red Cross trucks and into their mothers’ arms. We saw the hugs and we shared in the tears. We saw an entire nation welcome them home, both the living and the dead.

2025 was the year the hostages came home. Not all of them. Not as quickly as we prayed. But enough to remind us that God hears the prayers of His people.

And He does. In the summer, more prayers were answered. On June 22, 2025, the United States struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in a long-anticipated operation that the world had talked about in theory for years. Suddenly it was no longer theory. It was a sobering reminder that Iran’s threat to Israel and to the nations is not an abstract talking point and that the question of Israel’s survival is tied to American power and American choices.

It also exposed something else. When Israel is in the headlines and Iran is in the crosshairs, people start saying what they really believe about Jews, about Israel, and about whose lives matter.

By the second half of the year, reports on antisemitism were describing a reality many of us were already feeling. Jew-hatred was not only coming from one direction. On one side, it marched under banners about “liberation” and “resistance.” On the other, it hid behind nationalist talk and accusations that anyone who defends Israel “cares more about Israel than America.” Different language, same poison.

And then December brought Bondi Beach. On the first night of Hanukkah, Jewish families gathered by the water to light candles and sing about God’s faithfulness. Shots from a footbridge turned a holiday celebration into a massacre. The same city where a Jewish daycare burned in January watched Jews gunned down at a Hanukkah event in December.

After a year like that, it is hard to say “never again” as if the words themselves will hold. We have been reminded that slogans do not save lives. People do. Choices do.

As women of Christian Women For Israel, as modern-day Esthers, our calling is not to repeat “never again” and then move on. Our calling is to confront Jew-hatred wherever we see it, to stand with Israel and the Jewish people even when it costs us, and to live in a way that makes “never again” less of a line on a poster and more of a way of walking before God.

“And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
Esther 4:14 (NIV)