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here’s a certain closure for the hostages these days, with the return of the body of Ran Gvili, murdered on October 7 while bravely defending Kibbutz Alumim. With the return of Gvili’s coffin, something calmed.

“After two years and three months of continuous pain, deep fracture, and uncertainty, we can finally put behind the blackest period we’ve known,” Bar says. “Because a grave is not just a stone. It’s a boundary. It’s a point where one can truly lay their head, cry, and begin the mourning process.

“I know what it means not to know what will happen tomorrow, or if there will even be a tomorrow. I know how time stretches endlessly, days blending into each other, and nights where every thought becomes ten times heavier. And the waiting, hour by hour, day by day. Without answers, without information. Ran’s return, even with the unspeakable pain, is a certain closure.”

He remembers how it was for himself, when they felt that just maybe, hope against hope, something would move for them, too. During two years of captivity, every gesture, every small change, could signify something significant. I ask Bar to go back to the weeks before his own release. He says that period was “almost normal,” although the definitions are obviously relative. Depends   what you’re comparing it to.

“Let’s take that last period,” Bar recalls. “We had been  split up — only Elkanah Buchbut, Maxim Harkin, and I were left together. Until then, six of us had been crammed into one tunnel room for a year and two months. Now we were just three: That meant suddenly you have extra blankets you can use as carpets. And each person can sleep on two of those flimsy mattresses — or what they called a mattress. But at least now it was double, a bit more comfortable. When the stale pita that used to be divided among six is suddenly for three, it’s a little easier. In the ‘showers’ we made from a water bottle, now there was more soap to go around.”

Although the easier conditions pointed to a hope-against-hope that they might be released, Bar says that in the tunnels, it was impossible to look ahead to a potential release. Instead, he prepared a calendar for remaining in captivity, which covered the entire 5786 year.

“Family birthdays, chagim, events. I wrote everything down. The calendar was personal, but I shared it with anyone who wanted to review it,” Bar says. “One time we got a pen, and during one of the ceasefires, they even brought us a new shirt, folded around a piece of cardboard. For me, that cardboard was a treasure.”

They didn’t always get the dates right. They didn’t always know if a month was 29 or 30 days. Sometimes they hoped for scraps of news to align dates with the Yamim Tovim. And then they got a windfall: A few months before their release, their captors brought them a laptop.

“It’s insane, right? It was a Gaza-level laptop — old, used, outdated, but it had Hebrew, including a Hebrew calendar,” Bar says. “They were trying to influence us to convert to Islam, so the laptop had Islamic content translated into Hebrew. They thought we’d sit there all day reading it out of boredom, but they had no idea what they were actually giving us. The first thing I did with it was fix my calendar.”

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eanwhile, Julie Kuperstein was creating her own spiritual assets to help her son.

For the first weeks after October 7, Julie was numb with pain and grief. But after fellow hostage parents told her how important it was for her to join at the Hostage Family Forum, she initially acquiesced. Yet early on, she realized that the fight to bring Bar and the others home needed to be conducted on a battlefield much more cosmic than a negotiating table or protest rally.

Her initial effort focused on getting people to take on Shabbos observance and to garner other spiritual merits  to protect her son. And her mantra was popularized early on: “Bar isn’t in the hands of Hamas,” she would say. “He’s in the Hands of Hashem.”

When people would ask her what they could do to help the hostages, Julie’s response was always “tefillot, tefillot, tefillot, and kabbalot — to do more, to do better.”

Together with Riki Siton of the Nefesh Yehudi kiruv organization, she established a “Tefillah Tent” in Hostage Square, a place for people to daven, say Tehillim, lay tefillin, and garner inspiration from speakers and each other. She also created a “Tefillin Bar” campaign, in which each male captive was matched with a fellow Jew who committed to lay tefillin in his zechus for the duration of his captivity.

It wasn’t easy, though. Julie faced stiff opposition from the ardently secular volunteers at the Square, who initially relegated the tent to an obscure corner away from the high-volume traffic the other hostage endeavors enjoyed. (Julie and Riki refused to be deterred, though, and the tent was eventually given a more central place.)

Julie’s longtime unwavering emunah wasn’t lost on Bar when he was growing up. Julie herself was raised in a traditional though not mitzvah-observant home, and she assumed her life trajectory would be similar. She married Tal Kuperstein, a paramedic course instructor and Hatzalah volunteer, and began raising a family in Holon — until a close relative who had become a baalas teshuvah invited her to join some Torah classes.

Not one for half measures, Julie went all in. She kashered her home and began keeping Shabbos, dressing modestly, covering her hair, and even switched her children to religious institutions. Bar was enrolled in a Shuvu school in Rishon LeZion.

Yet her decision to embrace a Torah lifestyle wasn’t so simple. Tal was not into it at all, although their firm foundation of mutual love and respect and their joint commitment to each other and to their children saw them through and kept their marriage together.

“After becoming observant, I found myself in a constant dance between the raindrops. Despite enrolling my children in religious institutions, they had a loving father who wasn’t observant,” Julie told Mishpacha. “As they grew older, I didn’t force them into anything.”

But one thing they knew, she says: “Our family endured many difficult tests, and together we learned to overcome them, from a place of acknowledgement that Hashem sends us tests to strengthen us.”

Julie was referring to her husband Tal’s tragic accident several years ago. Tal was on his way to a Hatzalah call when he was in a serious accident, and in the course of the ensuing surgery, he had a stroke that rendered him paralyzed and unable to speak.

Bar, who was not yet 17 at the time, took on the burden of helping to support his family. A mature and resourceful young man and certified medic himself, he found a job in a security firm.

When Julie made her journey to observance several years back, she urged Bar to follow her and keep Shabbos, until she realized the pressure he felt to provide for their family was an obstacle too challenging to overcome.

When Bar got the offer to serve as deputy security officer at the Nova festival, meaning he’d be in charge of running security for the entire event, it was an opportunity to make a nice amount of money. His family was supposed to move apartments the following week, and he knew those funds would help.

On Hoshana Rabbah, he called his mother to wish her a good Yom Tov and Shabbat Shalom. “We have a tent here,” he told her. “We set it up nearby so we’ll be able to make Kiddush and have holiday meals, and I won’t be traveling on Shabbat.”

For years, Julia had tried to influence him to keep Shabbos, although she never demanded, never nagged. But this was the first time he himself initiated the conversation.

In the tunnels, he says, he decided to make a deal with G-d. “I told Hashem that if He gets me out, I would keep Shabbat properly. He held up His end of the deal, and so far, I’ve been holding up mine.

“In captivity, Shabbat was the most stable thing I had,” he says. “Underground, there’s no day, no night, no sense of time. But Shabbat is something that holds you and anchors you.”

Julie later learned that Bar strengthened himself in captivity with those very words that had become her mantra — how her son was in Hashem’s Hands and no other. In a moment of real mortal fear, when the terrorists told the six hostages in their group — Bar and Yosef Chaim, Elkana Bohbot, Segev Kalfon, Maksim Harkin, and Ohad Ben-Ami — to choose three of them to be executed, Bar sat quietly in his corner, repeating to himself over and over that he was only in Hashem’s Hands and no one else’s. In the end, as we know, they all survived.

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head of the security detail at the Nova festival, when the terrorists began their slaughter, he took on the role of commander, splitting up his team with quick-thinking instructions — secure the area, evacuate the people, help provide first-aid to the wounded. Back and forth, back and forth, into the fire, dodging bullets…. The military commander in the area later told the family that Bar was personally credited with saving hundreds of lives. But then they saw the terrorists face to face, and realized it was time to save themselves.

He and several others managed to dive onto a terrace while bullets whizzed overhead. For a few seconds there was silence, and suddenly, that silence was broken with screams and gunfire. Someone screams for his life, and then gunfire and silence. Again and again.

“Elkana, who was beside me, thought to get up and flee, but I didn’t let him,” Bar related. “I said, ‘Are you sane?’ During captivity, he kept saying, ‘Maybe I should have run.’ I told him, ‘Run? You’re alive now. Be quiet  and thank G-d.’

“In the tunnel, when we reconstructed what happened, one of the first things we tried to recreate was what happened on the terrace. It turned out that all of us — Evyatar, Guy, Elkana, and Almog — lay down flat and recited the Shema, being mekabel ol Malchut Shamayim. Maybe that’s what saved us — I don’t know.”

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hen Bar received his draft notice, he asked to postpone his enlistment so that he could continue to work in the family’s falafel business, which Tal had opened just months before his accident. He even moved in with his grandparents in order to make space for his father’s caregiver. And when he finally enlisted, he requested a condition: that during leave he would be able to work in his own jobs to help support the family.

Bar says he believes the challenges he went through before captivity helped give him the strength to survive it all.

“It might sound clichéd, but life prepared me for this,” he says. “You don’t fall anymore — you just say, this is part of what life is dishing you out.”

For the first month of captivity, they were in hideout apartments. The conditions there were horrendous,  and they were beaten constantly. “And throughout all that, we weren’t allowed to talk at all — not even to each other. l was bound by hands, feet, eyes. And if I tried to speak, they tied my mouth, too,” Bar says.

After about six weeks, the group was taken down to the tunnels. “You go down, down, down, and there’s no air — you can’t breathe. We got a wet mattress, a bag for our needs, and that was it. You had to make do. And you had to be creative. We got a block of soap that was supposed to last a long time. We started carving it into pieces, adding water each time, and made liquid soap from it. You learn to wash plastic bags, make hangers from electrical wires.”

Bar carried a reputation for being creative, for making liveable accessories out of discarded scraps.

“We had a few bottles we no longer used, so we made shelves from them, suspended with electrical wires,” he relates. “Whenever I started staring at something, my friends asked me, ‘What are you planning now?’ I was always finding something. I even built a little ‘kitchen’ by fixing a scrap of board between two arches. And we made curtains from trash bags.

“As for electricity, there was solar power in the morning for a few hours, depending on the sun and how generous they were, because sometimes they cut us off. They gave us an extension cord, one lamp, and electricity to charge our flashlights. At night, when there was no solar power, I opened the electric source with my teeth and added another lamp. I pulled another cord to an additional lamp and sockets.”

But during that time, he says, what they wanted more than anything was to know the news.

“Sometimes from the behavior of the terrorists, you could tell if a deal was coming or if it fell through, which frustrated them. They really didn’t want to be down there either,” he says.

Food, as we all know by now, was extremely scarce. Sometimes they’d be told, “There’s none today.” Or only a little.

“In the morning we’d wait for food,” he describes, “and then, when it arrived, we’d stretch the time as much as possible, distributing it slowly, making a ritual of it, because it helped pass the time.”

Bar admits that there were times when he simply lost strength. But then he’d rally, especially when he would hear the terrorists praying in Arabic, sanctifying death.

“I told myself, if they pray for murder, I must pray even more. I will pray for life,” he says. “At first, we weren’t allowed to speak aloud, so I prayed quietly. When we could finally pray out loud, I’m sure we shook the tunnels.”

Bar began reciting Shema regularly, davened what he remembered, and recited the one chapter of Tehillim that he knew by heart. And he would awaken his fellow captives between Rosh Chodesh Elul and Yom Kippur to recite Selichos.

Meanwhile, as political forces were trying to hammer out a deal, Julie Kuperstein would say, “I’m busy with a deal all day, a deal with HaKadosh Baruch Hu. He’s the only One I make deals with.”

At some level, Bar must have felt it, too.

“There was a terrorist with us at one point who would bait me, saying, ‘Where is your G-d now?’ And then I began to ask myself, ‘How did Hashem bring us to this situation? How did He allow this to happen?’

“At home, with questions like that, I would ask my mother,” Bar says. “I thought about what she would say. She would surely tell me, ‘Bar, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is putting you to the test.’ And I understood I needed to pass the test.

“And so, I started having my own conversations with Hashem. I didn’t ask, ‘Come get me tomorrow,’ because I was afraid that I’d get caught in unreasonable hope and lose my sanity. But everything I needed, I asked from Hashem. A little more food, a little more hope. Bring good news, or give a sign. And He heard our tefillos. Once, they gave us only one meal worth of food. You think you can’t take it anymore and you daven, ‘Abba, give me strength to go to them and ask for food, and that they will listen.’ Because they don’t always come. Then you go, approach them, and even before you say a word, they announce: ‘We’re giving you food for two meals.’ ”

He describes the energy of Shabbos. “I would close my eyes and imagine being at the table with my family, imagine the piece of bread we kept — if it hadn’t yet spoiled — as if it were challah. We made Kiddush on water and then would tell each other, ‘Shabbat Shalom, brother.’ We made Havdalah on some mint-scented medicine we found, and on Chanukah, every day we lit a candle with a flashlight.” On Yom Kippur and Tishah B’Av they fasted, breaking their fast on half a pita.

“I didn’t keep Shabbat before, and I didn’t wear tzitzit regularly,” he would later tell Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch on a visit to Bnei Brak as a gesture of gratitude to the public who poured out their hearts for his release. “But those two years made me understand that emunah was really the only thing that could sustain me.

Upon his release, the first things he asked for were a pair of tzitizis and tefillin.

And he wasn’t shy about going out in public with them, either. At Hostage Square a few weeks after his release, he organized a national public tefillin ceremony, calling on both the audience at the Square and people around the country to join him in donning tefillin.

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ne of the most chilling moments for Bar was on his birthday. Bar celebrated two birthdays in captivity: when he turned 22 and when he turned 23. At the time, he had an old radio-tape player his captors had given him in order to listen to recordings in Arabic, and they were occasionally able to pick up Israeli news broadcasts on it as well.

“Suddenly,” he says, “I was able to pick up an Israeli broadcast and realized they were talking about me. It was my birthday, and I heard Mom’s voice, inviting all of Klal Yisrael — rabbis, artists, everyone, to an event that night in honor of my birthday. Then I burst into tears, crying my eyes out, and everyone got emotional with me. It was an incredible birthday gift.”

I look at Bar’s wrist. He wears a bracelet reading “Always in the Hands of HaKakosh Baruch Hu.” It’s the same bracelet he made sure to give to anyone who visited him after his release — from the Minister of Defense to the captives who survived together with him.

Full disclosure: I was actually involved in getting those bracelets produced. At the time, I was sure that, with Hashem’s help, Bar would already be back with us by the time the bracelets arrived. We prayed fervently that this would happen. I didn’t think the bracelets would arrive first, but suddenly, from the depths of despair, from hope that was fading, it happened.

“I know I owe you a bracelet,” Bar says, handing me his own.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1098)