Nearly 60 years have passed since Eli Weisel’s visit to the Soviet Union in September 1965, which prompted his report on Soviet Jewry, resulting in his book The Jews of Silence. Weisel writes of the eyes he encountered wherever he went and of the fear that was palpable among the Jews who made brief contact with him before disappearing into the shadows. I no longer recall the sequence of events from that time, but I know that after the Six Day War in 1967, many of those Jews were no longer silent and efforts increased among world Jewry to pressure the Soviet regime to allow Jews to practice their religion or to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel or elsewhere. Many of us recall the demonstrations and boycotts and letters to government officials of that time.
I am not sure when exactly it began, but I know that early in my rabbinate in the mid-70s, congregations were urged to give a face to some of the nameless three million Soviet Jews by twinning our teenagers with Jewish Soviet youth as they celebrated their bar or bat mitzvah. The American young people were given the names and contact information for kids in the Soviet Union whose families had sought unsuccessfully to leave and who were unable to celebrate their Jewish coming of age in freedom. Our bar and bat mitzvah students were urged to write to their counterparts in Russia (actual letters in those pre-email days) and in some way to share their special day with them. In many congregations, a chair was set aside on the bimah, perhaps with a tallit and a prayerbook on it to symbolize this absent young person living in the Soviet Union who was prevented from joining them that shabbat for their bar or bat mitzvah and could not participate in a ceremony of their own. The empty chair on the bimah was a powerful reminder of the ongoing oppression of Soviet Jewry.
After the brutal attack and the slaughter of nearly 1200 innocents in Israel by Hamas on October 7th last year and the kidnapping of over 250 individuals, some of the national Jewish organizations urged congregations to follow a somewhat similar practice as we have continued to pray for the safe return of the hostages held by Hamas and its allies. Our congregation and many others joined in this project. Looking through the list of those held captive, we picked two people at random, one a very young hostage, a toddler named Avigayil Idan, and the other an older person, Ditza Heiman. We found pictures of them and read a bit of their background in the Israeli press and learned what had happened to them on October 7th. Setting two chairs on the bimah with prayerbooks and decorated with Israeli flags, we added their pictures. We saw them as representative of the 250 hostages still being held last fall as we prayed for the speedy release of all those in captivity.
When the news came of the release of over one hundred hostages during a brief ceasefire last winter, we were thrilled that among them were both Avigayil and Ditza. We were able to remove their pictures from the chairs now that they were safe at home. But the empty chairs have remained on the bimah as about 130 other individuals were still being held in captivity. At that point, one of our members told us of the in-laws of a cousin of theirs whose twin 26-year-old sons had been thought to be among those many people murdered in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on the border of the Gaza Strip on that disastrous day. Later, however, the two young men were confirmed to have been taken by the terrorists as hostages and, to our knowledge, are still alive today. So, since that time, the pictures of Ziv and Gali Berman have remained on those empty chairs on our bimah in the hope that these young men may soon return along with all the remaining surviving hostages. It is so important that we continue to think of these individuals as real people with families and lives that have been interrupted by terrorists and not simply as abstract numbers. We continue to pray for the Berman brothers’ safe return and we hope that negotiations for their release and of all the others will soon prove successful.
But not all the captives have returned alive. One of my colleagues recently inquired whether other rabbis had suggestions for her on how best to mark the death of one of the captives whose picture had been on a chair in their synagogue when Israeli intelligence reported their deaths in captivity. This rabbi was planning to place signs of mourning on the chair, to deliver a brief eulogy from the pulpit and invite the congregation to recite kaddish for a captive who would not be returning to their family and whose chair would remain empty.
This week, as we all are so painfully aware, a number of congregations throughout the world have faced that reality. Last Saturday, Israel Defense Forces found the bodies of six young people in one of Hamas’s network of tunnels. None of these people had died due to the horrible circumstances under which they have lived in captivity these past eleven months. Rather they all had survived the worst and had lived with hope of rescue until their captors cold-bloodedly murdered them a day or two before the bodies were found. Hamas made a feeble attempt to cast blame on the IDF, but forensic evidence quickly squashed that effort. These were not battle wounds, they were execution-style murders by a terrorist force which has demonstrated once more their total disregard for human life whether of their sworn enemy or of their own people.
These particular murders were made even more painful as so many of us recognized one of the victims, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who along with four other of the victims had been abducted from the Nova Music Festival which they had attended or where they had been working and the sixth was taken from her home in nearby kibbutz Be’eri. Three of them, including Hersh, were slated to be among the first released once a ceasefire agreement was reached. Hersh’s parents Jon and Rachel have been among the most active families doing all that was possible to remind the world of the plight of their son and the others. Their moving appeal at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks ago helped make Hersh a familiar name to many in this country and around the world. It is hard to look at his picture without feeling the joy this young man brought to his family and friends and now the utter desolation and grief that this brutal murder and those of his comrades evokes. His parents spoke bravely at his funeral urging ongoing efforts to free all the rest.
We mourn the loss of all these victims, yet clearly Hersh’s murder was felt most painfully both in his country of origin, the United States, as well as in his adopted country of Israel where enormous crowds turned out for his funeral earlier this week. In Israel, the deaths of all of these captives have triggered protests, strikes, and led to mass gatherings in the streets of Israel pressing for a resolution to the ongoing situation. The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, spoke at Hersh’s funeral and apologized personally for the failure of the State to keep their son safe and for the failure of the government to obtain his release. We all realize that the end of Hamas’s reign of terror would not only benefit Israel but would be a blessing for the people they have so cruelly ruled for nearly two decades in the Gaza Strip. Yet one asks at what cost to those still being held hostage would that effort be?
There are empty chairs draped in mourning in many synagogues in this country this week, congregations that were praying specifically for Hersh’s release and for all the others being held. However, beyond that, every lost life, whether of the hostages or of the soldiers fighting to defend Israel and end this scourge of terror leaves a gaping hole in the lives of their loved ones. Vacant chairs are at family tables throughout Israel as these needless deaths bring pain and suffering to their families and to their friends. We all join the Polin family and the families of the other five victims, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Labanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino. We join with all the people of Israel and those in communities around the world who mourn the deaths of these young people and the continued loss of life throughout the area. There are still empty chairs in so many congregations as we await the return of nearly one hundred people still being held. We know that some of them are no longer alive, but we pray for the safe return of the others. May the Almighty send His consolation to all those whose lives have been torn asunder and send comfort to all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, speedily and soon.
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