Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin will do whatever it takes to get their son back alive

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Goldberg-Polin Family

When their grievously wounded son Hersh was dragged off into Hamas captivity, Chicago-born Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin became the global face of a campaign to keep the hostages’ cause alive. As they strive to present their son’s case to a hostile world, Hersh’s parents are trapped in a reality that few can understand

Pesach came, and with it the first sign of life from Hersh Goldberg-Polin in six long months of captivity. Hamas’s psychological warfare department released a short video of the 23-year-old Israeli-American hostage who was snatched from the Nova festival on Simchas Torah morning. The Arabic and English-subtitled clip showed that the once-smiling, happy-go-lucky young man who never raised his voice to anyone was now a gaunt, pale hostage with a Muslim-style haircut and deadened eyes.

Reading from a script prepared by his Hamas captors, edited to emphasize his agitation, he raged. “Binyamin Netanyahu and government — you should be ashamed of yourselves for torpedoing every hostage deal. While you sit having lunch with your families, we sit here without water, food, or sun and the treatment that I so badly need,” said Hersh gesturing with his half-healed stump of an arm.

That was what viewers worldwide saw. But in their home just a few dozen miles from the Gaza tunnel hiding their son, Hersh’s mother Rachel Goldberg-Polin detected something else. “I still felt whispers of Hersh, in the way that he turned to us and said the names of his sisters and said, ‘I love you — stay strong.’ ”

Call that intuitive reading what you will — desperate hope, a mother’s love — but if you meet Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, you’ll see that it’s 100 percent authentic. There’s a certainty born of some sense of spiritual connection flowing between Jerusalem and that dreadful bunker in Gaza that tells them that Hersh will come home. Rachel in particular talks about his well-being with a startling confidence: “I imagine that he’s bored because he always needs to be reading, and wonder whether he’s learned Arabic from his captors — he has a photographic memory.”

That certainty has transformed Rachel into the global face of an effort to keep the hostage story alive. Along with the now-famous white masking tape with the number of days that Hersh has been held captive that she wears every day, her mix of drive and destiny have born Rachel into the White House, the Vatican, the United Nations, the world’s front page, and countless news shows and rallies.

In a previous life Jon was a serial tech entrepreneur and Rachel worked in mental health. That’s all gone. Now, they work together for 20 hours a day. Along with a small team, they relentlessly strategize, work for media exposure, and lobby leaders all over the world.

Their message is simple, scrupulously avoiding politics, emphasizing universal themes: “Just imagine that this was your son and daughter,” they tell the interviewer, politician, or potential influencer. It’s a highly-strategic formula that has gained them entrée to a media that has largely shut the door to Israel’s narrative.

Like long-distance runners who’ve discovered unimagined reserves of endurance, there’s a tightly-strung energy to both of Hersh’s parents. But there’s something volcanic about Rachel’s calm — a pain that occasionally breaks through the deceptive serenity with which she goes about the fight for her son’s life.