A father-son reunion, and lessons of light shining out of the darkest places

Photo: Ariel Ohana

For two years, while the Jewish world was davening for a miracle, the hostages who’ve survived 738 days of horrifying captivity lived through their own miracles. “Everything there was beyond nature,” says freed hostage Yosef Chaim Ohana. “Only prayers and faith protected us.” A father-son reunion, and lessons of light shining out of the darkest places

Anyone who watched the now-famous clip of the first embrace between freed captive Yosef Chaim Ohana (Yosef Chaim ben Miriam) and his father Avi was surely brought to tears, as the words Shema Yisrael — the same words Yaakov Avinu shouted when he finally saw Yosef — spontaneously burst forth from deep in Avi’s soul.

“Every day there were miracles of salvation,” says Avi Ohana in a conversation with Mishpacha together with his son Yosef Chaim, days after his release from Hamas captivity. “Hearing all the horror-filled stories over these last days, there was just no way in the natural order of things that a person could have gotten out of there alive.”

But Rav David Abuchatzeira, the famed mekubal from Nahariya, knew differently. He told Avi from the very beginning that Yosef Chaim was protected, guarded, watched over with special care — “like an etrog,” Rav David would say over and over — and that no harm would befall him; that tens of thousands of angels were watching over him and all the hostages in Gaza.

“Even when we had no sign of life from Yosef Chaim, I received signs of life through Rav David,” Reb Avi says. And everything Rav David told me came true. He told me that my job in this story was to sanctify Hashem’s Name, and when I told him I had never spoken publicly before, his response was, ‘Don’t worry, Hashem will open your mouth.’”

Indeed, for the past two years, Avraham Ohana hadn’t stopped encouraging tefillos and the accruing of mitzvos in the merit of his son’s salvation

When other hostages were released last February, leaving Yosef Chaim and others behind, Rav David told Avi that Yosef Chaim would be released last, physically and emotionally whole, and that all twenty would be freed together. And then Rav David repeated the words that he’d said to Avi several times over the last two years, the mysterious final verses of the long Hoshana Rabbah prayer: “Kol mevaser mevaser v’omer — The voice of the herald brings good tidings and proclaims…”

On the morning of Hoshana Rabbah, just as Avi was klapping his aravos on the ground and completing those prayers, Yosef Chaim was freed.