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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022

(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.

Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.

Harriet Bograd

A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.

Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)

Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”

Henry Berg-Brousseau

Transgender activist from Kentucky

Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)

Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”

Rabbi Simcha Krauss

Orthodox advocate for women’s rights

Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)

Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”

Rabbi David Weiss Halivni

A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud

Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)

Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.

Moris Albahari

A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past

Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)

Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”

Rachel Brodie

A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast

Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)

Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.

Rabbi Steven Sager

“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond

Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)

When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”

Nate Geller

Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities

Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)

Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”

Hedi Fried

A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden

Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)

Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.

Rabbi Sy Dresner

The “most arrested rabbi in America

Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)

Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”

Eli Evans

‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’

Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)

Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.

Sheryl Grossman

A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities

Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)

Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”

Dara Goldman

A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime

Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)

Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”

Yaakov Shalev

A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s

Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)

“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.

“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.

“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter

Trude Feldman

A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews

Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”

Harlene Winnick Appelman

A revolutionary leader in Jewish education

Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.

Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.

Tom Tugend

An indefatigable journalist

Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)

Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”

Judah Samet

A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror

Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)

Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.


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2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can

(JTA) — Hamas returned the bodies of two more hostages late Wednesday and said it had released all of the remains it is able to access, leaving 19 people unaccounted for.

The two hostages returned Wednesday, DNA analysis showed, were Muhammad Al-Atarash and Inbar Hayman.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced in December 2023 that Hayman, 27, had been killed in Gaza after being abducted from the Nova festival. And the Israeli army announced in July 2024 that Al-Atarash, 39, a Bedouin father of 13, had been killed in combat while responding to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

Their return leaves 19 hostages unaccounted for and deepening tensions over their return. The ceasefire deal struck last week required Hamas to release all hostages, living and dead, within 72 hours. It met the deadline for the 20 living hostages, who were freed on Monday, but has not for the deceased ones.

Israel reportedly believes that Hamas knows where additional hostages’ remains are located, following reports from freed hostages that they were sometimes held alongside bodies. President Donald Trump, who brokered the deal between Israel and Hamas, said on Wednesday that he believed further efforts were being made to locate the hostages, who were killed on and after Oct. 7.

“It’s a gruesome process,” he said. “But they’re digging. They’re actually digging. There are areas where they’re digging, and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies. You wouldn’t believe this. And some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble.”

Turkey has reportedly offered to send teams of searchers who have expertise developed through responding to earthquakes in their country. The country’s relations with Israel deteriorated sharply during the Gaza war as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly supported Hamas.

The status of the remaining hostages has left Jews around the world torn over how deeply to celebrate the living hostages’ release and the end of fighting. Some say it is inappropriate to celebrate when there are still 19 people abducted from Israel who have not been returned for a proper burial.

The post 2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can appeared first on The Forward.

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Simchat Torah in Hostages Square lays bare divide over just how much to celebrate yet

(JTA) — Rabba Anat Sharbat, the unofficial “rabbi of Hostages Square,” wept as she recited the Shehechiyanu blessing after lighting the candles to mark the beginning of Simchat Torah holiday on Monday evening, hours after all 20 living hostages returned to Israel.

Two years before, the same holiday had been marked by silence and fear after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel ended celebrations across the country.

Before the plaza even became known as Hostages Square, Sharbat had established what became a ritual — Kabbalat Shabbat services and Havdalah every week, in her words, “out of a deep belief that there needed to be a space here for prayer,” not only for protest.

Faith, she said, had played a role in the hostages’ return.

“The prayers in the square were an integral part of the effort to return them,” Sharbat said. “We heard from hostages who came back that they heard and felt the prayers, and that it gave them strength.”

Last Simchat Torah, she faced uncertainty about whether to hold prayers at all. There was barely a minyan — the quorum of 10 needed for Jewish prayer — and dancing felt impossible. Still, she insisted on continuing “out of a deep belief in the need to maintain hope, together with the families, that their loved ones will return home.” That conviction was validated when Dvora Leshem, the nonagenarian grandmother of the hostage Romi Gonen, approached the small group that night and said she was glad the prayers were taking place. Romi Gonen would be released about three months later.

On this year’s Hebrew anniversary, a very different scene unfolded in the square. As evening fell, a few dozen men and women gathered for prayers followed by hakafot, the traditional Simchat Torah dances encircling the Torah scrolls. The crowd of dancers quickly swelled to more than 200, while onlookers filmed and applauded from the sidelines. Among them was a woman in a Bring Them Home T-shirt who recalled that less than two weeks before Oct. 7, the sight of public, gender-separated prayer during Yom Kippur services had filled her with “extreme anguish.”

“But today, let them dance,” she said. “We are all dancing, finally.”

But the joy was marred by the knowledge that not all the deceased hostages had returned. For some, that reality was impossible to reconcile with the scenes of jubilation. One man, wearing a T-shirt that read in Hebrew, English, and Arabic “We are all created equal,” shouted at the dancers while filming on his phone. “These religious zealots can’t just stand respectfully, they have to dance like animals,” he said.

By Wednesday morning, eight bodies had been brought to Israel for burial. Seven were identified as hostages, while the eighth did not match any of the 28 confirmed dead. Two more, both Israelis, were returned on Wednesday.

The tension carried into Tuesday night, when tens of thousands filled Hostages Square again for a second round of Torah dancing traditionally held after the holiday. The seven dances alternated between grief and gratitude, each dedicated to a different group, including the fallen hostages still in Gaza, those who had returned, reservists, and their families.

Tel Aviv Deputy Mayor Chaim Goren said the event, organized annually by the municipality with Ma’ale Eliyahu Yeshiva and other national-religious groups, was originally meant to take place at a nearby plaza. “It felt detached to hold it there,” he said. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum agreed to move it to the square, though the decision wasn’t final until the last minute.

“There was back-and-forth until the holiday started about whether and how to do it,” Goren said. “With all the joy, there’s still a kvetch in the heart” — using the Yiddish word for ache — “but there’s also a deep need to give thanks to God for what we’ve witnessed.”

For Tel Aviv resident Sapir Barak, the night offered a release she hadn’t allowed herself since Oct. 7, 2023.

“When they announced the release yesterday, I basically had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “I was crying so much. There are so many emotions. It’s like a dream come true, but you don’t know what to do with it.”

Nearby, Henri Rosenberg cut an unusual figure in Hasidic garb with a fur shtreimel and a “Bring Them Home” dog tag around his neck, standing beside his grandson who wore a red MAGA baseball cap. But despite appearances, Rosenberg said he no longer identified as haredi Orthodox, having grown disillusioned by what he called indifference within some haredi circles to the pain felt by other Israelis during the war. Health problems had led him to attend a nearby national-religious synagogue over the High Holidays, where, he recalled, “the cantor wept for the hostages and the soldiers.”

“They are our flesh and blood, and that’s why I’m here tonight,” he said.

From the stage, Genia Erlich Zohar, aunt of American-Israeli hostage Omer Neutra — whose body remains in Gaza and who would have turned 24 on Tuesday — called on the crowd to respect the duality of the moment.

“We hold both joy for those who came home and hope and pain for those who haven’t,” she said. “We are one people, one heart.”

Miri Polachek, a friend of the Neutra family who has volunteered with relatives of the hostages, said she came to the event to support the Neutras and the other families. Recalling her own son’s playdates with Omer when they were children, she said, “It’s a never-ending reminder that it could have been any of our children.”

Among those on stage was Elkana Levy, a Golani Brigade officer who lost both legs in an explosion in Khan Younis. One of three brothers wounded in the Gaza war, he led a silent hakafa from his wheelchair and vowed that those “fighting day and night for the return of our brothers … would never break.”

At the edge of the square, a few dozen demonstrators held posters of those still in Gaza, chanting “Everyone, now!” — the familiar rallying cry for the hostages’ return.

Hagit Chen, holding “Gucci,” the small white dog that had belonged to her son, slain hostage and dual American-Israeli citizen Itay Chen, whose body has not yet been returned, called Monday’s release “a huge miracle,” even as she admitted her faith had been shaken.

“I was convinced Itay would be returning home yesterday with the others,” she said. Still, she added, the elation around her was not an affront. “I don’t look at joy that way. I embrace what’s happening here. We all need the strength it gives us.”

“But we cannot take our foot off the gas,” she said. “The deal is not a good one for the fallen hostages.” She pointed to what she described as the vague language of the Trump.-brokered agreement, which requires Hamas to make “all necessary efforts” to secure their release. “If we don’t see their return, it will be an open wound for all of us.”

Dani Miran, whose son Omri was among those freed on Monday, said Israel should halt the next stage of the deal until every hostage is accounted for.

“We should have resumed fighting at 1 p.m. yesterday, the moment we understood the 28 bodies weren’t coming home,” he said at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, where his son is receiving treatment. “[Hamas] will not understand anything else.”

Miran said he would remain in Tel Aviv, where he has lived since his son’s abduction, until the last hostage returns. He declined to say whether he would shave his long white beard, a vow he made to keep until Omri came home.

Activist and artist Hila Galilee, posed with Miran’s longtime partner, Galia Korel, while holding a mock yellow Torah scroll with images of the hostages. “The entire Torah is the hostages,” she said.

The question of what to do with the hostages’ symbols no longer has a single answer. Romi Gonen was filmed with friends tearing off the tape marking the number of days the hostages have been held, cheering as they did. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who began the tape tradition for her son, slain hostage Hersh, said on Wednesday that she would continue to wear hers.

Hagit and her husband, Ruby Chen, criticized Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana for removing his hostage pin during President Trump’s visit to the Knesset. “It isn’t over,” Chen addressed Ohana in a video posted to social media. “Put the pin back on until the last hostage is back.”

After Trump announced that the living hostages would be returning home, Miran urged Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai to rename the site Returnees’ Square. But Hagit Chen said in an interview on Tuesday night that the name Hostages Square should remain until all are home.

In the square, posters of freed hostages have been taken down, some replaced by new banners, including one with Trump’s words, “Now is the time for peace.” Other features remain unchanged, including the mock tunnel evoking the underground passages where many hostages were held in Gaza and the digital clock counting the days and seconds since the attacks.

Miran, who had walked the one block from the hospital to the square, led the crowd in a psalm of thanksgiving. “Secular, religious — I hate these distinctions. All I see from up here is Jews,” he said from the stage. “Let’s stay like this. The nation of Israel lives.”

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2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can

Hamas returned the bodies of two more hostages late Wednesday and said it had released all of the remains it is able to access, leaving 19 people unaccounted for.

The two hostages returned Wednesday, DNA analysis showed, were Muhammad Al-Atarash and Inbar Hayman.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced in December 2023 that Hayman, 27, had been killed in Gaza after being abducted from the Nova festival. And the Israeli army announced in July 2024 that Al-Atarash, 39, a Bedouin father of 13, had been killed in combat while responding to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

Their return leaves 19 hostages unaccounted for and deepening tensions over their return. The ceasefire deal struck last week required Hamas to release all hostages, living and dead, within 72 hours. It met the deadline for the 20 living hostages, who were freed on Monday, but has not for the deceased ones.

Israel reportedly believes that Hamas knows where additional hostages’ remains are located, following reports from freed hostages that they were sometimes held alongside bodies. President Donald Trump, who brokered the deal between Israel and Hamas, said on Wednesday that he believed further efforts were being made to locate the hostages, who were killed on and after Oct. 7.

“It’s a gruesome process,” he said. “But they’re digging. They’re actually digging. There are areas where they’re digging, and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies. You wouldn’t believe this. And some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble.”

Turkey has reportedly offered to send teams of searchers who have expertise developed through responding to earthquakes in their country. The country’s relations with Israel deteriorated sharply during the Gaza war as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly supported Hamas.

The status of the remaining hostages has left Jews around the world torn over how deeply to celebrate the living hostages’ release and the end of fighting. Some say it is inappropriate to celebrate when there are still 19 people abducted from Israel who have not been returned for a proper burial.


The post 2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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