In the wake of October 7, Hadassa Ben Ari, an Israeli writer and mother of seven, looked around her home and asked herself how she would explain the horrific events of the day to her young children. Israeli experts in childhood education and psychology were appearing in papers and on television saying not to discuss the attacks with young kids. Children need to be protected from the news, those specialists argued.

This didn’t sit well with Ben Ari. After all, she reasoned, Jewish children already know about the more difficult parts of Jewish history. They are taught about Pharaoh, who ordered the drowning of all Israelite baby boys and enslaved the Jewish people for hundreds of years. They know about Haman, who tried to have all the Jewish people killed.

“Our children already know stories from the Holocaust,” Ben Ari explained in an interview. And the truth was that every aspect of Israeli society was already surrounded by the aftershocks of October 7. There was no hiding the reality from her children. There was only curating it for them.

She decided that the way to approach these stories was by focusing on individuals. “I want my children to have heroes beyond Spider-Man and Captain America,” Ben Ari said.

So she and a team of collaborators got to work. They sifted through stories on the news and on social media. They interviewed survivors and spoke to eyewitnesses. Then they adapted those narratives to make them accessible and appropriate for young people. The result is The Heroes of October 7th: Heroic Stories for Children (Yedioth Books), edited by Ben Ari with graphics and illustrations by Tehila Bar Hama. The collection includes 72 two-page stories, a number written by Ben Ari, meant for adults to read together with children aged 10 and younger.

From the now-famous savta, Rachel Edri, who offered her captors cookies, to the Nova survivor who escaped and then returned to help others do the same, each vignette offers a small glimpse into how “regular” people become heroes.

There is nothing gory or concretely scary in the chapters, which instead focus on the brave actions—big and small—of that fateful day and what followed, as opposed to the death and destruction.

Take, for example, the story of 11-year-old Ido, who lives in Talmei Yaffe, a small moshav near Ashkelon and the Gaza border. His family stayed behind to care for the moshav’s farm when most of the community was evacuated at the start of the war. There was no school, no afternoon activities and no friends for him to play with.

With no other children on the moshav, he might have grown angry with his parents. Instead, he played soccer with the soldiers stationed at the moshav, eventually joining them in their fitness training and for dinner each night.

“And if you think that the soldiers did Ido a favor by including him, you may be right, but it is important to know that Ido also helped the soldiers a lot,” writes contributor Yonatan Ofir. “Every time they saw him, they thought of their children at home, and of the children of the settlements around Gaza.”  They remembered, the story concludes, “who they are fighting for and who they are protecting.”

Ben Ari said she believes that true heroism can be found in the little moments, and that we raise our own heroes by validating upstanders and small acts of kindness, teaching our children about making choices in the difficult moments.

Her hope is that this collection of stories will model for a new generation of Jewish children what a hero actually looks like, and implant in them the confidence that, should the need arise, they, too, can be heroic.

Talia Liben Yarmush is a writer living in New Jersey as well as the former digital editor of Hadassah Magazine.