The return of Agam Berger last Thursday had special meaning for me

Photo: Flash90

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very return of a hostage seized by Hamas on Simchas Torah 5784 provides an infusion of adrenaline to Israeli Jews. But the return of Agam Berger last Thursday had special meaning for me, as my wife and I have met her parents, Merav and Shlomi , at a number of the events for hostage families sponsored by Kesher Yehudi.

The parents of the hostages have almost uniformly put their lives on hold over the last 480-plus days in order to devote themselves fully to securing the release of their children. What makes the Bergers unique is that their efforts have been concentrated almost entirely in the spiritual realm. While many other parents of hostages have taken on new mitzvah observance as part of their efforts, for the Bergers, ruchniyus activities have been the near exclusive focus of their efforts.

Merav, Agam’s mother, grew up in a religious home, and she had begun to return to Shabbos observance after the passing of her mother, even before the terrible events of Simchas Torah. But after Simchas Torah, the entire family, beginning with Agam’s father, and then her twin sister and two younger siblings, began moving toward ever greater observance, including setting up a shul in the downstairs of their apartment building.

AFTER Agam was captured and taken to Gaza, Merav did not leave her house for weeks on end. The only thing that gave her any solace was reciting Tehillim. But when Shelley Shem-Tov, a leader of the Hostage Parents Forum, and Mrs. Tzili Schneider, the founder of Kesher Yehudi, announced the first shabbaton for families of the hostages, the Bergers were there, and they have participated in every Kesher Yehudi event for hostage families since then — multiple shabbatons, a Purim seudah, and prayer gatherings at the Kosel and Kever Rochel.

At the first shabbaton, Shelley Shem-Tov described how she and her husband had learned from freed hostages who were held in captivity with their son Omer that he had spontaneously begun making Kiddush and keeping Shabbos — not even using the flashlight issued to him in the dark underground caves in which he was held. And all quite independent of the Shem-Tovs’ growing involvement with Kesher Yehudi.

So it was with the Bergers. When captive Agam Goldstein was freed after 51 days in captivity, during the first ceasefire agreement, the first call she made upon arriving in Israel was to Shlomi Berger, whose birthday it was, to tell him that his daughter Agam refused to eat meat or to clean or cook for her captors on Shabbos.

Rather than being angered by her refusal, her captors respected her religious convictions, and even provided her with seeds to eat. At one point, one of her captors brought her a siddur, which he told her he had found. And she and the four other surveillance soldiers captured with her were able to daven. Agam became a quasi-rebbetzin for the group, and they strengthened one another to not eat bread on Pesach and to fast on Yom Kippur, despite their meager diets.

Learning that Agam was also keeping Shabbos gave Merav a powerful feeling of being connected with daughter in a common battle. From that time on, Merav has been speaking nonstop around the country. Everywhere the message was the same: “Agam was kidnapped because she is Jewish: Be more Jewish.”

At the first shabbaton for hostage families, she began an ongoing chavrusah with Dafna Ber, the wife of the newly appointed Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Rav Kalman Ber, and that is only one of her numerous regular chavrusos. Merav Berger was only one hostage mother to gain a chavrusa through the shabbatonim.

Merav Leshem Gonen, whose daughter Romi was also released last week, has been learning with Rabbanit Yaffa Deri, who also attended that first shabbaton.

“Our chavruta was about finding the connection between us,” Romi’s mother told an interviewer last summer. “We are both very strong, opinionated women. But through learning together, we learned how to truly trust one another.”

After this past Simchas Torah, Merav began an initiative to encourage women to observe the laws of taharas hamishpachah as a zechus for Agam. She has received many hundreds of responses so far from women committed to taking on the mitzvah, in part or in its entirety, on Agam’s behalf.

Over Succos, Merav and Shlomi  joined the Schneiders for a Chol Hamoed meal. During the meal, Merav asked Rav Gavriel Schneider, the senior ram in the yeshivah of Rav Tzvi Kushelevsky, “What does Hashem want from us?”

Rav Schneider told her, “I cannot answer that question for you. Only you can answer it. He is speaking to you, not to me.”

She also asked him where we see the Divine rachamim in the horrors inflicted on Simchas Torah and in the inhuman conditions in which the hostages are being held. Rav Schneider told her, “We are an eternal people — am netzach — and that means that this world is not the measuring rod, but rather the world of eternity. And in that world, when Agam Berger keeps Shabbos in the most difficult imaginable circumstances, the impact of what she does is for eternity, and so is her reward.”

WHEN THE BERGERS LEARNED that Agam would be one of the first of the new group of hostages to be released, they went to Rav David Yosef to ask him what they should do if she were to be released on Shabbos. He pointed out that their daughter could be further traumatized if all the others released were greeted and embraced by their parents and she was not.

In the tense days prior to the first scheduled release of captives on Shabbos, Merav was in constant contact with Mrs. Schneider to discuss how to handle Agam’s release. Mrs. Schneider explained that she and her husband could insist on being informed by a Druze or other non-Jewish soldier, and that they could also be driven to the receiving point for the hostages by a gentile. At one point, the IDF contacted Mrs. Schneider and asked her — in vain — to stop interfering.

On Erev Shabbos, before the release of the first group of hostages, and still not knowing whether Agam would be among them, Merav posted a request that no one drive to the place where the hostages were to be handed over, or take photographs of the happy moment, or turn on a broadcast. “There will be plenty of time for celebration later,” she said.

That Erev Shabbos, Meirav received thousands of messages from Jews telling her that they were going to keep Shabbos for Agam.

As it turned out, Hamas did not release Agam in that first group. Agam’s siblings were devastated. But Merav assured them, “Elokim does not make mistakes. This will turn out to be a present.”

She noted that the first letters of Agam Berger — beis and alef — spell out Bo, the parshah of the coming week.

In the end, because of Hamas’s earlier violation of the agreement for the return of hostages, the schedule of releases was expedited. Agam, Arbel Yehud, Gadi Mozes, and five Thai workers were released on Thursday, and another three Jewish hostages on the second Shabbos.

DURING AGAM’S LONG captivity, Merav found her diary, in which she had written, “B’derech emunah bacharti,” and Merav frequently referred to those words in her talks. As Agam boarded a helicopter to be taken to Beilinson Hospital for observation after her release, she held up a sign that became instantly emblazoned in Jewish hearts around the world: “B’derech emunah bacharti; b’derech emunah chazarti — In the path of emunah, I chose; in the path of emunah, I returned.”

And as for her mother, Merav, she told Mrs. Schneider, “Now, I know what Hashem wanted of me. To convey the message that Shabbos and the Jewish People are inseparable.”

Danny’s Song

I’ve reached the age where shivah visits occupy more and more of my time. And with their increased frequency, I find myself reflecting on the question of how we are remembered.

The truth is that I find most such visits to be uplifting in some strange way: They bring home the fact that something precious has been lost, and the world is a poorer place with the passing of the recently departed. The great conductor Arturo Toscanini used to say that he could immediately detect if a single violin was missing from a 120-member orchestra under his baton, and so it is when a single member is lost to the great symphony of the Jewish People.

On its face, the shivah of Daniel Jacobson a”h was not terribly promising. I did not know him. And though I very much enjoy speaking to his mother, Jan Sokolovsky, who is nearly two decades older than I, the occasions for doing so have probably numbered no more than five or six over the years — at a variety of political gatherings, public talks, and once while on line at Kennedy Airport.

But she remembers my mother’s family from the South Side of Chicago, and we share a University of Chicago connection as well. She was one of the early women pioneers at the law school, and she also earned a PhD in economics from Columbia before going on to teach at the university level. Surely, a sufficient bond to make a shivah call when I received a message informing me of her son’s passing.

Danny, the youngest of her three sons, was not dealt an easy hand in life. Before he learned to speak, it was discovered that he had an 80 percent hearing deficiency. Yet his enormous motivation to succeed, and the intense familial support he received, resulted in a normal youth. He was an avid one-on-one backyard basketball player, a Chicago sports fanatic, and a superb mimic of teachers and friends, despite his hearing deficiency. He spent a gap year at a yeshivah in Israel and graduated from Yeshiva University. But after college, he was struck with debilitating depression, which waxed and waned but never left him entirely over the next 35 years.

Yet that’s only part of the story. What shocked me was the number of people who took the time to share heartfelt remembrances of Danny’s impact on their lives and how much they will miss him: his two older brothers, nephews and nieces, neighbors who grew up down the street in West Hempstead, his bar mitzvah coach, dorm mates at Yeshiva University, his audiologist, and his roommate in the group home in which he lived in his later years.

And that does not even include the elderly residents — mostly Russian-speaking immigrants and Holocaust survivors — with whom he interacted at Melabev, a Jerusalem daytime facility for those suffering the loss of mental acuity, at which Danny volunteered. At the shivah, his mother eagerly showed me a book of photos of Danny at Melabev, dancing and otherwise interacting with the residents, all smiling broadly.

In those remembrances, the same words and descriptions recur constantly: kind; gentle; a deep thinker, who challenged one’s assumptions on topics both weighty and trivial (two of his YU dorm buddies wondered whether the frequent debates with Danny had drawn them to careers in the law); an extremely attentive listener, who knew just what questions to ask to extract another’s thoughts and who could restart a conversation precisely where it left off, even after the passage of years; his love of long talks veering from topic to topic; his keen sensitivity to others and ability to read people. Every letter or voice note referred to his unique sense of humor and his eidetic memory, which enabled him to repeat word for word conversations from 30 years earlier, often with voice imitations of the participants thrown in.

His nieces and nephews remembered him playing on the floor with them when they were children or listening to records together on an old gramophone, and they recalled their eagerness to see him when they visited Israel from America in their teenage and adult years. A niece described his “special interest” in her, and how he always conveyed the sense of enjoying her company, which was very important to her as a youngster.

His own struggles gave him a special sensitivity to those of others. One former neighbor remembered, “He was the older brother I never had, particularly after my father died. He would play catch with me for hours, never losing patience. And even if other friends [his age] were over, he always made sure to include me.”

Another recalled his “constant, never-ending conversations with my mother, to whom he was like another son.”

Hillel Fendel, the son of the recently deceased Rabbi Meyer Fendel a"h, the founder of HANC and Danny’s principal, prepared Danny for leining his bar mitzvah parshah, which he did with the precise trop, despite his disability. He recalled that Danny was always “jovial,” and related their sense of triumph when they discovered a trick to help Danny pronounce the letter shin properly just days before the bar mitzvah.

Miriam Adler, Danny’s audiologist in his adult years, brought out another aspect of his character. Despite his need for routine in his life, he displayed real “bravery” in his determination to make a success of his cochlear implant at close to 40, even though the implant involves learning to hear in a completely different fashion.

One story Jan told at the shivah touched me deeply. The family was returning from visiting her mother in Chicago, a few days before the opening of the new school year. As soon as they landed in New York, however, Jan received word that her mother had suffered a heart attack.

Every year, Jan would accompany Danny to the first days of classes in elementary school to guide his teachers and help him adjust to a new voice. But this time, Danny, then 11, told her that though he relied on her help, “Grandma is your mommy, and you are her only child. You must be with her.”

Yehi zichro baruch. 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1048. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)