Was he missing? Dead? Wounded and unconscious? Or had he been taken hostage? Chaos reigned supreme, inflicting indescribable agony

On Simchas Torah 2023, as the illusion of control was shattered and Jews all over began to reconnect with their core identity, Hashem drew me into the saga as well, allowing me to stand alongside survivors and hostage families in their darkest hours.

Two years later, with the release of the remaining hostages, many of their stories have since had a happy ending, while others have had tragic closure. Either way, it’s my privilege to continue to share the journeys of these families with you.

I was invited to speak at one of the many Shabbos gatherings for hostage families because of my work as a Holocaust guide. “You’ve met so many survivors,” Rabbanit Tzila Schneider, head of Kesher Yehudi and organizer of these special shabbatons, said to me. “You’ve led a hundred tours of Auschwitz. Tell them that Am Yisrael has been through worse — and yet, here we are.”

But over the course of that Shabbos, through my conversations with the families, I came to realize that this was a terrible mistake.

I met fathers and mothers losing their minds from worry — they hadn’t eaten or slept for months. The fear for their sons — and to an even greater degree, for their daughters — was driving them to the brink.

Many people get angry when I say this: “You have no idea what Auschwitz was like,” they tell me. But the truth is, I do have some idea what Auschwitz was like — and I also have some idea of what it’s like to be the parent of a hostage. I’m not saying we’re all living through another Holocaust. But these parents? They’d choose the Holocaust over the nightmare they’re living through right now.

To be officially recognized as a “hostage family,” certain criteria had to be met. More than two months after Simchas Torah of 5784, many families were still in painful limbo. A loved one who wasn’t answering the phone — was he missing? Dead? Wounded and unconscious? Or had he been taken hostage? Chaos reigned supreme, inflicting indescribable agony.

The first two weeks were spent checking every hospital in Israel to see if perhaps the missing person was among the wounded. But even after that, there were no answers. No one could say for sure who was alive and who was dead, who was on Israeli soil and who had been taken to Gaza.

I met parents who endured ninety days of agonizing uncertainty before they finally got the knock on the door confirming that their son was alive… in Gaza, in the hands of bloodthirsty murderers.

Others knew that their loved one was in Gaza, but whether he or she was alive remained a mystery.

“It’s been over four months,” one family told me, “and we haven’t received a single scrap of information.”

Yonatan Samerano, who attended the Nova festival, tried to flee with his car into Kibbutz Be’eri for shelter together with two friends, unaware that the kibbutz had already been overrun by terrorists. A Hamas vehicle came up behind them and shot all three at the gate. That was at 6:55 a.m. Security camera footage from the entrance to Be’eri shows Yonatan lying motionless by the gate for a long time. Then, at 9:34 a.m. the cameras showed that someone, later identified as an UNRWA social worker, kidnapped his body and took him into Gaza.

Yonatan was originally declared a hostage. After a certain period of time, however, his parents were informed that they should sit shivah. Analysts had studied the footage — the weapon used, the angle of the shot, the way Yonatan fell and remained still — and concluded that he had indeed been taken to Gaza, but was no longer alive.

Yonatan’s mother, Ayelet, insisted on consulting with a doctor and a rav. “How can you declare him dead without taking his pulse?” she demanded. “Are you killing my child based on a video?”

They tried to reason with her. No, it was impossible to be one hundred percent certain. True, if he had been married, this level of doubt might not be enough to allow his wife to remarry. But since he was single, sitting shivah made sense either way. If he was no longer alive, the shivah would serve as an aliyah for his neshamah. And if he was alive, it would be a segulah for arichus yamim.

So they sat shivah. People came to comfort them, but in her mind’s eye, Yonatan’s mother never stopped seeing him as alive.

Until June 22, 2025, when the IDF and Shin Beit recovered his remains in an overnight operation in Gaza and returned him to Israel for burial.

While Mrs. Samerano continued to hope, she didn’t want her son’s bar mitzvah tefillin to just lie there, but she couldn’t give them away either — because although he wasn’t a regular tefillin wearer, she was sure that when he would come back, he’d want them. So she began traveling all over with her son’s tefillin — to Geneva, Brussels, The Hague — in an attempt to move the international community to action. Upon meeting a distinguished diplomat at The Hague, she asked, “You’re Jewish, right? Did you put on tefillin today? Please… put on my Yonatan’s tefillin.”

“And that’s how I became a Chabad shluchah,” this self-defined “secular” woman said.

Since Yonatan’s kidnapper was a UN employee, the Samerano family was always included when hostage families traveled to international functions and meetings. At one such meeting, a group of distraught parents faced nine stiff-faced diplomats seated at the UN Security Council table.

One of the delegates turned to Ayelet Samerano and asked, “I understand your son is no longer alive. How important is it to you that his body be returned?”

She sprang to her feet. “If my son is no longer alive, it’s because of your people. The very last thing I can still do with my child is to say goodbye to him. There is no way I’m backing down from that.”

After I heard this story, I wrote the Sameranos a letter:

Do not give up. Do not break. Chazal say that one who is present at the time of a Jew’s passing must rend his garment, because it is like witnessing a Torah scroll being consumed by fire.

A living Jew is a kosher sefer Torah, which may be opened and read from. A deceased Jew is like a pasul sefer Torah — it may no longer be read from, but it is treated with utmost reverence.

Keep fighting to bring Yonatan Hy”d, your sealed sefer Torah, back home for a proper Jewish burial.

Although I think it’s clear why comparisons to the Holocaust simply had no place at the shabbaton, I did share one Holocaust story that I believe resonated:

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on Erev Pesach of 1943. On Leil HaSeder, two of the main leaders of the uprising entered the home of Rabbi Eliezer Yitzchak Meisel, who was conducting a Seder for dozens of ghetto survivors, for his blessing that their mission succeed. The table was set with tiny matzos and wine goblets. Outside, explosions reverberated through the air while inside, family and guests were reciting the Haggadah.

The men arrived just as one of the children was asking the Four Questions. When he finished, he turned to his father and said, “Tatte, I have one more question. What will happen to us? What will next year’s Leil HaSeder look like? Will I be zocheh to ask you the Four Questions? Will I be zocheh to have you answer me?”

A heavy silence filled the room as Rabbi Meisel replied, “I don’t know. I can’t say whether you or I will survive. But I know with absolute certainty that somewhere in the world, a Jewish child will sit with his father on Leil HaSeder. He will ask the Four Questions, and his father will tell him the story of how Hashem took us out of Mitzrayim. I do not know my fate or yours, but I can assure you that Am Yisrael will endure forever.”

When a certain fellow in the audience — a hardened, left-wing, ultra-secular Israeli — shook my hand afterward and said, “Thank you, Harav, for giving us chizuk during a very trying time. It’s true: Am Yisrael chai,” it was clear that Rabbi Meisel’s words echoed our eternal promise.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1087)