Family Minded

It was Ronen Tzur, a crisis management specialist, who brought the Hostages Forum into being within 48 hours of the Hamas attack last month. Tzur, a leading political strategist whose campaign gave then-political-neophyte Benny Gantz 35 Knesset seats in the 2019 election, saw that the families whose loved ones were in Gaza had nowhere to turn. With the government focused on securing the borders and preparing a counter-attack against Hamas, the hostage issue was pushed down the agenda in the chaos.

The nascent group identified a need to keep public attention — both in terms of media and diplomacy — on the unique humanitarian issue of the captives, which was in danger of being subsumed in the larger narrative of the war.

A first step was to assemble a team of some of Israel’s leading negotiators, of the sort who could command attention in foreign capitals. Former Mossad head Yossi Cohen — with active links inside the Israeli government and Arab capitals — became one invaluable asset. Ex-minister and Shin Bet boss Yaakov Peri was another, supplemented by David Meidan, who negotiated the Gilad Shalit hostage deal for Bibi Netanyahu in 2011, and Ory Slonim, perhaps the longest-serving hostage negotiator anywhere.

This dream team — whose members can be seen walking the corridors of Da Vinci 13 — were ahead of the government curve when it came to engaging with foreign leaders on the issue. A major target was the emir of Qatar, a Hamas patron who has invested billions in attempting to buy his country legitimacy, by among other endeavors, buying Western sports teams.

“Qatar’s ruler understands that if he wants to be perceived in the free world as the partner of murderers and pogromists, then he has to stay the current course,” says Amos Pikal. “But if he doesn’t, then he needs to make sure the captives get back home.”

There are rumblings, of course, about the quasi-independent policy being spearheaded by the group’s effort. But there’s an internal recognition that the efforts of high-profile figures such as Yossi Cohen are supplementary, and that it’s government action that will dictate events.

In other areas, though, the independence of the Hostages Forum has enabled the group to operate where the government either can’t, or won’t. In the former category falls the legal effort headed by Raz Nezri, until recently Israel’s deputy attorney general. His efforts to bring Hamas to justice at the International Criminal Court in the Hague are a solo effort of the Hostages Forum.

“Since Israel doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, the country can’t pursue this avenue,” he says. “Because we’re a private group, we can.”

Another area where the group has stepped into the void left by a slow-moving state apparatus is health data collection. With the nimbleness of a start-up, the group added a medical team headed by Professor Hagai Levine, a public health expert, which quickly assembled all the medical data of the captives and established contact with the Red Cross.

A second guiding principle was to wall off the cause of the captives from the overall campaign for Israel’s legitimacy. “Obviously we’re affected by Israel’s overall public image,” Pikal says, “but this is purely humanitarian. We focus on the fact that there are captives from nine months old to 87 years old. It has nothing to do with who is right and wrong — that is the only way to operate here.”

That approach has informed the work of a number of retired diplomats who’ve taken up the baton at the Forum, engaging with foreign ambassadors and using their contacts in foreign services abroad to pressure governments to act.

Daniel Shek, a former Israeli ambassador to France, is one of those who’ve stepped forward. “We’re a single-agenda organization, who represents only the families, which makes it easier for us to gain access than the government,” he says. “We try to help out with anything that requires international contacts. For example, we send delegations of family members, and we want to make sure that they meet the right people where they go. And we host foreign ambassadors to meet families, to help break down the very abstract number of 240 hostages, into the story of individuals. In our experience so far, no one can fail to be moved by this story.”

Baby Behind Bars

A few doors down from the door with a “diplomacy” sign stuck on it, is the “story” that Shek refers to.

Eylon and Tal, who sit wearily checking and rechecking their phones for any hint of an update, are cousins of perhaps the most shocking case of the entire captive list.

Reaching into a plastic bag, Eylon — who works in a tech company in the music field — takes out a number of large posters, and hands me one with a smiling, ginger-headed baby. “Do you remember the nine-month-old who was kidnapped?” he asks. “This is Kfir, his four-year-old brother Ariel, mother Shiri, and father Yarden.”

The horrifying footage of the mother holding her two sons and being hustled away from Kibbutz Nir Oz by terrorists, became emblematic of the attackers’ brutality.

And for Eylon and Tal, the ensuing month has seen their lives upended. “Yarden, Shiri’s husband, went out to defend the family with his pistol,” says Eylon. “We know that he was badly wounded in the head, and we’ve no idea if he is alive. Shiri was bottle-feeding Kfir, but we don’t know if he is getting any formula. We have literally no information, and we’ve spent the month living in suspense — we can’t mourn and we can’t move on.”

What struck Tal most strongly was the thought of how long their relatives have been in captivity. “Look at this poster,” she says. “It reads ‘9 months old,’ but that’s no longer true. He’s now ten months old, and has spent a tenth of his life in captivity.”

In an example of how local companies have stepped forward to help hostages’ families, Eylon’s bosses at Simply, a music education app, have continued his pay despite the fact that he’s not currently working.

Asked how Jews elsewhere can help, Eylon replies that he thinks that more influence needs to be brought to bear on the Red Cross. “This is an organization that is meant to help captives, yet they’ve given us zero information, and we need to find a way to pressure them.”

Day Without End

For Shelly Shemtov, a mother of three from Herzliya sitting downstairs at the building’s entrance, the nightmare began on Simchas Torah morning. Her 21-year-old son Omer was at the music festival in Re’im when the slaughter began. Panicked, he called his parents saying that he was escaping, and turned on the live tracker function on his phone.

“We were following his route, until suddenly my daughter cried, ‘Look, it’s going the wrong way!’ We rang him again and again, but there was no answer, and the screen showed that his phone had crossed into Gaza.”

For Shelly, it was a dreadful feeling, yet one whose implications they denied. “We told ourselves that someone had taken his phone, and that he was in Israel. So my husband went to check in the hospitals in the south, to locate Omer. In my mind, I thought that he must have hidden somewhere or been injured — I never imagined a reality as horrible as this.”

It was only later that night, that Shelly was forced to confront the truth, when a friend of Omer’s sent a video that showed him, hands tied behind his back and on the floor of a pickup truck, being taken into Gaza.

For the Shemtov family, the last month has been nightmarish. “For us, the clock stopped on October 9, and since then, we’ve both given up our jobs to sit and do anything to bring back Omer. I can’t sleep or eat properly — all we can do is give interviews, and campaign for our son.”

But the strange suspended state in which the captives’ families find themselves has provided a point of light in Shelly’s case, through her connection with a group of religious women, whom Shelly has come to call her “angels.”

“One day a couple of weeks ago,” Shelly says, “I was sitting with other families, when I saw four religious women come in. I went over to say hello and ask what they were looking for, and they replied that they had come to see how to help.

“I told them that our needs were being taken care of, but that I would like two things: to be prayed for, and hugged.”

Thus began a relationship that developed into a source of great comfort for Shelly and other women among the captives’ families — a conversation that has bridged the intense secular-religious divide that was a feature of the previous year in Israeli society. “I am secular, and they’re religious, so we don’t know each other, but over the past few weeks, we’ve come to understand and appreciate one another.”

Global Gathering

The group whom Shelly Shemtov encountered in the hostages’ headquarters was headed by Riki Siton, who runs Ayelet Hashachar’s Chavruta program, which pairs up secular and religious Israelis for Torah study.

Long active in the Gaza Envelope area, including the kibbutzim worst hit by Hamas, it was natural that Ayalet Hashachar, headed by Rabbi Shlomo Raanan, should reach out to the victims, but the captives’ families — with their unique circumstances — were an unknown quantity.

“We knew that there was no chareidi presence there, but it’s like an open wound, and we didn’t know how we’d be received if we just walked in,” says Riki Siton.

So, one day Siton walked on, and was greeted by Shelly Shemtov, and a connection was born. Based on that initial positive encounter, Siton knew that there was an opportunity for religious people to contribute.

“As religious people, they want us to help in the way that we know — by davening. People will come up to you and say, ‘Please take the name of my child.’ Some have told me, ‘I don’t know how to pray, and don’t feel good starting now, just when I need it, so please, you pray for me.’ ”

The contacts with the mothers grew into an initiative for a women’s tefillah rally, which took place on Thursday night at the Tel Aviv Museum, an open space a short distance from the headquarters of the Hostages Forum, where many of the families gather.

“We thought that there’d be a few thousand women at the event, but then it snowballed into a global event. Thousands gathered in Tel Aviv and hundreds of thousands joined from around the world.”

Riki Siton and Ayelet HaShachar intend to expand the campaign for religious Jews to get involved, and Siton says, distance doesn’t matter.

“What a person needs to do is to share the empathy that we as religious Jews naturally feel for them. They want to hear that their pain is being shared, and if someone even far away manages to convey that empathy, then it goes a long way.”

Hate Display

A few hundred meters away from the Hostage Forum is the Tel Aviv Museum, whose large open plaza is now being referred to as “Kikar Hachatufim,” or Hostage Square. From lampposts, fences, and street furniture, leaflets recording individual captives flap in the late-afternoon breeze. Normally host to various outdoor art exhibits, the square is now the location of a chilling work of public design whose purpose is to portray the human suffering of the hostages.

In the center of the square, a long Shabbos table is laid out, surrounded by 241 empty chairs, symbolic of the void that has been left around so many family tables.

To one side, under an awning, the flagstones are covered with a long row of pictures, interspersed with teddy bears, a sad reminder of how many children the pitiless terrorists abducted.

Next to the pictures is a neat double row of tens, now home to some hostage family members who are intent on making sure that the heart of Israel’s economic capital is reminded of the plight of their loved ones.

What’s most noticeable about the crowd of hundreds who’ve come to pay their respects is how aimless people look. Asked where the captives’ families are, a woman holding a handmade “Bring Them Back” sign says that she was also wondering the same. This is a crowd who’ve come to identify with others’ pain, even if they have no concrete way to salve it.

To one side, a chassidic man sits in animated discussion with a group of elderly secular types, and the conversation — about the role of chareidim in society — takes place in earnest tones, as if in this place of tragedy, there’s actually a dialogue, not just the normal sloganeering.

The families, who have a room inside the museum where they can eat or work, are a study in weariness. Walking into the lobby where they gather is like entering a giant shivah house.

“My son’s name is Oren,” says one man, a high-tech entrepreneur from Haifa whose name I don’t catch. “I have no words to describe the thought of my son in their hands. He’s a soldier, and Hamas are animals.”

Oren’s father can’t talk much, but he readily offers his son’s name — Oren Maksim ben Orna — for prayer. Likewise, the woman sitting next to her daughter on a couch: “Please pray for my brother Almog ben Nira,” she says.

Oren’s father has one important wish, that reflects a growing demand from the hostages’ families: “The government has to declare a cease-fire first, get the hostages back, and only then go on with the war,” he says.

It’s a demand echoed by Shelly Shemtov. Unlike others who harshly criticize the government’s actions, she says that the authorities seem to be sharing all the information they currently have. Yet she still finds herself at odds with the backseat that the hostage rescue efforts have taken to the war.

“My job as a mother is to worry about my son. He’s in the hands of devils, and although I believe that he is alive, he needs to be freed from that danger now.”

That demand — as yet mostly voiced by the families themselves — is putting pressure on the government, which prioritizes the destruction of Hamas to prevent a repeat of the atrocities. As yet, the issue of the captives hasn’t been politicized, but it’s becoming clear that for all the government talk of twin goals of defeating Hamas and hostage rescue, the two are increasingly at odds, inevitably impacting the focus of the Hostages Forum, which advocates solely for the families.

Family First

In the office towers around Tel Aviv’s center, the workday is over, but at the Hostages Forum, the lights will be on until late at night. For Amos Pikal and many of the volunteers, there are no hours. This is not a job — it’s something far more visceral.

“I couldn’t stand by and do nothing,” says Tomer Evlagon, an entrepreneur and business associate of Pikal’s. “For many of us not in the reserves, we feel impelled to contribute in some way.”

Down in the basement is another volunteer-run room, dedicated to the T-shirts, wristbands, and black and red posters that have become ubiquitous at rallies worldwide for the kidnapped. The volunteers staffing the shop — a CEO, professor of film studies, and German immigrant — are motivated by the same bottom line: it was either stay at home and cry or do something.

In many ways, this building vibrating with all the energy that Israel’s private sector can muster is a giant coping mechanism parleyed into positive action.

For both Pikal and Evlagon, that involves sourcing funding for an operation that, while volunteer driven, burns through vast amounts of cash in advertising and fighting the media war. Checkpoint, an Israeli cyber-security company, pays for the building and its overheads, and Publicis, Israel’s biggest ad agency, has moved large numbers of its staff into the operation on the company’s own tab, but the operation requires major cash infusions to grease the wheels of the social media advertisers who spread the word.

A month into the campaign to bring start-up know-how to the task of keeping Israel’s captives at the center of global attention, an open question is by what metric to measure the success of such a daunting enterprise.

Until that miracle happens, the center on Da Vinci Street has become a kind of second home to some of the hostages’ families as they fight to bring their loved ones back. Like Moran, a bearded man on the fifth floor who sits and answers the same question about his relatives from yet another Zoom interview, there’s a wearying familiarity to the whole cycle.

For others, such as Shelly Shemtov, the ray of light that has pierced the current darkness is connected to the way that their cause has extended her sense of family to a demographic whom she hadn’t previously encountered.

“I think what’s happened to us Israelis is that G-d wanted to bring us together as one big family, whether we’re religious or not,” she says with passion. “So, when I hear that a cheder boy has prayed for my son, it moves me so much, because this is our power as Jews, that we pray and work together.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 985)