The abuse of Israeli hostages shocks a ‘bring them home’ movement that feeds on hope
If the current ongoing ceasefire and release of hostages provided a new kindling of resolve, Saturday’s images brought a cruel splash of reality
Close relatives of Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi, at the family home in Tel Aviv, react as they watch on a television screen his release along with two other hostages in the Gaza Strip, Feb. 8, 2025. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll February 11, 2025
(JTA) — When four young Israeli soldiers were released in Gaza last month, Jewish activists on behalf of all the hostages held by Hamas indulged in something that looked like hope. The four women appeared outwardly healthy, and made defiant gestures in front of their captors.
Videos of their reunions with family were joyous, and even their hairstyles – long braids, the loving handiwork of yet another hostage released just days later – were copied by women in Israel and abroad in celebration and relief.
And then came Saturday. The sight of three men released in the latest exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners — shockingly gaunt and grim as they were paraded and made to thank their Hamas handlers — caused heartbreak and fury, and invited a comparison that touched on the depths of collective Jewish trauma.
“It looked like the liberation of Auschwitz or Buchenwald,” said Rabbi Naomi Levy, of the Nashuva community in Los Angeles. “This recent release confirmed our people’ worst nightmares.”
Since the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres, the plight of the hundreds of hostages kidnapped that day has galvanized North American Jews and provided a much-needed focus for their grief and helplessness as distant observers of a brutal war being fought thousands of miles away. Synagogues left empty chairs in the fronts of their congregations, Jewish federations distributed “dog tags” with the names of the captives, and institutions hung “kidnapped” posters in their lobbies.
Shorn of an explicit political message — unlike in Israel, where rallies for the hostages are often directly critical of the government — the Diaspora activism carried with it a sense of tempered hope, captured in a verse from a “prayer of gratitude” written by Levy.
“We give thanks for every hostage released today. / For joyous reunions filled with tears of thanksgiving,” she wrote. “But for the hostages this hope-filled day of homecoming / Will also be heartbreaking, / A time of mourning for murdered loved ones.”
Saturday’s release of Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben-Ami and Or Levy starkly, even unbearably, underlined the heartbreak. Sharabi, 51, was unaware that his wife Lianne and their two daughters were murdered during the 2023 attacks. The despair and anger over the hostages’ physical condition were compounded when Hamas said Monday that it would indefinitely postpone the release of more hostages.
The “bring them home” effort has previously experienced the whiplash of emotions from hope to despair, going at least as far back as August, when the bodies of six hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were recovered in Gaza.
For Rabbi Adam Kligfield of Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, such feelings define the Jewish condition.
“What does it mean to be prepared to have every expression of joy, as we’ve done at every wedding, be tainted by tragedy and moral inversion?” he said in an interview. “This is an exquisite and acute version of it, but sadly not something that is novel, at least for people with a sense of Jewish history.”
At his Conservative synagogue, congregants recite a modified version of the Hallel prayer every day on which a living hostage has been released. Mindful of the mix of relief and sadness, the usually celebratory prayer is recited “almost dolefully, with a sense of ache, knowing that we can’t mark the return to life and to their families of those who are captive” without acknowledging “the cloud that is so ponderous around them,” he said.
Kligfeld and others I spoke to also sense feelings of fatigue among the Jewish public around Oct. 7 and the hostages’ plight, a natural deflation after 16 months of mourning, protesting and war. If the current ongoing ceasefire and release of hostages provided a new kindling of resolve, Saturday’s images offered a cruel splash of reality.
Prior to last summer, the Israeli-American group UnXeptable D.C. sponsored weekly vigils in the nation’s capital, vowing to do so until the last hostage came home. When many of their followers left town over the summer, the protests dwindled. More recently the group has been partnering with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum chapter in Washington on demonstrations and vigils, hoping to return to their regular schedule of weekly protests.
“I’m not sure fatigue is even the word,” said Vered Guttman, one of the UnXeptable D.C. organizers. “It’s more the world. It’s more like frustration, like you don’t know what the game is. Who do we push? What can we do? I mean, just standing and shouting ‘bring them home now’ — who brings them home?”
This week she submitted an op-ed for Haaretz, calling on the Jewish community to appeal to every leader they know — rabbis, federation leaders, politicians and local media outlets — to sustain the ceasefire and achieve the hostages’ return.
Guttman knows that Hamas is ultimately responsible for releasing the hostages, she said, but as an Israeli critic of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she is frustrated that he took so long to sign a ceasefire deal. The condition of the male hostages only compounded her fury.
“We knew for certain that the Israeli government knew that this might be their condition,” she said of the starved hostages. “There’s so many levels of sorrow here.”
For Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, of New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, the sight of Saturday’s released hostages reinforced the sense of moral clarity that he said is missing among those indifferent to or critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war.
“We are dealing with an enemy that is merciless,” said Hirsch, the former executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America. “It is a travesty that anybody in the West supports these barbarians and presumes to speak in moral terms. These are pictures that reminded every Jew of the Holocaust.”
In January, after the announcement of the ceasefire deal that promised the release of 33 Israeli hostages over the following six weeks, Hirsch gave a sermon addressing the “bittersweet” nature of the moment. He also projected beyond the hostage crisis, describing a time when Israel and Jewish communities around the world could begin their “post-traumatic healing.”
“We can’t get to the post-traumatic phase until the issue of the hostages is resolved one way or the other — the ones who are alive are restored, and the ones who are not alive are brought back for proper Jewish burial,” he said in an interview. “For all these reasons, the state of those three hostages emphasized the urgency on all counts.”
Like Hirsch, rabbis are also reminding their followers that any relief over the release of living hostages will be tempered once the bodies of others are returned as part of any deal.
Preparing congregants for days like that, said Rabbi Levy, is “something I’ve tried to do my whole career.”
“It’s very important to focus not only on the pain and the horror, but to focus on the joy as much as possible, to give our kids and our adults experiences of Jewish joy and pride,” she said. “There is such an inheritance of trauma, and Oct. 7 has certainly touched this inherited grief and fear.”
That trauma was on display on Saturday, she said, but the hostage crisis has also provided contrasting examples — like that of Liri Albag, the 20-year-old who emerged as a leader among her fellow hostages and intervened to save the life of a fellow soldier who was being tortured by her captors.
Said Levy: “What I try to work with and remind people is to really focus on our perseverance and our resilience, and to believe in that and to bear witness to it.”
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