A year later, hostage families turn to Rav Dov Landau for support and solace

Photos: Yisrael Cohen and Elazar Feinstein

When family members of the hostages gathered together at the home of Rav Dov Landau for words of support and blessings, the feeling was surreal: They’d been in this room a year before, at the beginning of the war. How had an entire year passed with their loved ones still hanging on in their subterranean prisons, somehow clinging to life with guns to their heads?

AT the entrance to the modest house on Rav Sher Street in Bnei Brak, the five men wait anxiously — hunched, weary, but still with a faint spark of hope in their tired eyes. Over the past year, they’ve become unwilling ambassadors of an unimaginable reality as they hold pictures of their loved ones, those taken by force amid the mayhem and murder of their own families into the tunnels of darkness, the depths of the unknown.

Their fatigue is evident. Some of them are the captives’ only surviving close relatives. They’ve spent the past year shouting, meeting with ministers and Knesset members, addressing senators and parliamentarians, prime ministers and senior US officials, begging and protesting — always dragging along the pictures of their captive nieces or nephews, brothers or sisters, sons or daughters, mothers or fathers — sharing their relatives’ personal stories, describing the unfathomable torment they must be going through in their underground prisons, surrounded by madmen.

They never believed that, a year and a month after the devastating massacre, they would still be standing in public squares holding those pictures, fighting for their loved ones’ basic right to live.

But they’re not naive. They understand the complex reality in which they’re entangled, and they also know that people stopped listening to them long ago. Of course, everyone prays for the hostages, but the public attention that was focused on them during the first weeks and months of the war has faded. With a war of survival on multiple fronts, missiles falling, soldiers being killed daily, leaving young widows, orphans, and grieving parents, as well as a shifting international political landscape, their pain has been pushed off the top rung of the public agenda.

And yes, the leftist, oppositional political affiliation that identifies their group hasn’t done them any favors either. But at this point, they don’t care about right or left. They only want one thing: to see their family members come home alive in the best case, or to kever Yisrael in the worst.

And so they remain, clutching the photos of their loved ones, surrounded by their stories, memories, sleepless nights, and unending pain, upholding the responsibility to continue crying out on behalf of their relatives still trapped in the dank depths of Gaza.

And we’re with them as they wait their turn to enter, seeking once more the blessing of Slabodka Rosh Yeshivah Rav Dov Landau.