While We Waited for Your Return

In the hours while we waited for the first three Israeli hostages to return from 471 days of captivity in Gaza.

Romi Gonen (right) and her mother embrace after Romi’s return from Hamas captivity on January 19, 2025 (photo: IDF)

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This is a guest essay written by Gavriella Zahtz, founder of Partners in Hope.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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What is it like sitting under an Iron Dome beneath a David’s Sling and more than one arrow while somewhere in that airspace countries and leaders and bureaucracies and not a few well funded puppets — who desire nothing more than the total destruction of my people, the Jewish People, on or off of our ancestral land of Israel — are volleying missiles, interceptions, hostage names, or who are alive or not or mostly in the first round?

And as they volley, we sit here with the most gaping, horrific, national pain while the world even now cannot even wait a breath before dancing on our graves and rejoicing at our sacrifices and missteps in petty and so big I’ll fall on this sword internal conflict that should be kept within the family — but we’re the Jews, those Jews who refuse to commit suicide on your RPG.

And the first three names come in. And I can’t breathe. I write a note:

The first three names. The first three daughters and sisters, granddaughters and I’ll-be-your-forever-persons have been released. Romi Gonen. Emily Damari. Doron Steinbrecher. Our girls are coming home after 471 days in H-LL. I can’t breathe. We are not okay. The greatest joy wrapped in such unimaginable loss. To be Israeli is to hold it all. At. The. Same. Time.

HaKadosh Baruch Hu — Our G-d in Heaven who holds answers that we cannot begin to understand. Please let us see the good. Your children are hurting.

Then I get a WhatsApp photo of just-planted flowers in Jerusalem. I can’t help but smile. And I smile. Then I realize … three little birds. Romi Gonen. Emily Damari. Doron Steinbrecher.

To be nearly Israeli is to hold it all.

At. The. Same. Time.

Of course we are in pain. Deep pain. Searing pain. The kind of pain whose overture is the symphony of cracking ice going on and on and on from that first break whenever and wherever that was.

While we are in pain, we refuse to be victims. We reject the notion. This is one of the irreconcilable differences between Israelis and our Western friends and family. The “woke”-infused Western universities who have been able to take over entire cities, states, countries, and regions with its industry of victimhood and graywashing of the realities of evil here on this earth.

We are setting free murderers and rapists with an absolute certainty that they will kill and rape again. We are releasing back to their jungle Palestinian terrorists who have killed our innocent babies on school buses and our elderly Holocaust survivors at bus stops.

In exchange for this guarantee that we are today setting free the next Palestinian terrorist who will kill my sister or brother, my innocent baby riding a school bus or my elderly Safta¹ who survived now twice watching their babies burn in the ovens … In exchange we are getting back three Bas Yaakov’s, daughters of Israel, who have spent 471 days being raped, tortured, and terrorized while the world of feminists and liberal-loving (unless it’s a Jew) activists has not just forgotten them, but said they are casualties of a war that is ultimately their fault.

Leave no baby behind. Not living. Not dead. (Yesterday we recovered the remains of one of our boys they killed 10 years ago and continued to torture the family by not allowing the body to be buried. A Jewish burial. Ten years). Leave no child behind.

And yet every one of us has a piece that will never return. A child killed or taken. An uncle saved, but never from the nightmares. A side casualty of October 7th whether from faith or fortune or love or hope — lost now, possibly never to be returned.

But our babies are coming home.

Yesterday in the full daylight of Shabbat, in the middle of a busy, modern, thriving secular city of Tel Aviv, a 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist stabbed an Israeli. The man was “seriously wounded.” In other words: not dead, but close. No reason — just another Jew with the audacity to live as a Jew in a Jewish country.

The terrorist was killed. If he had lived, he certainly would have been set free in a future swap for 0.01733193277 of a girl stolen in the very beginning of her life for the crime of being a Jewess in a Jewish country. That is the math. We release up to 1,904 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including several serving multiple life sentences for deadly terror attacks and murder, in return for 33 Israeli hostages. Mostly alive. We do not know.

In 471 days the International Red Cross has been unable to verify who is alive. And today, as the lists with our babies names float between truths and fantasies of socially bankrupt media, still, we do not know. Are we releasing the murderer of the one and only son of our next door neighbor who we’ve known since grade school in exchange for a lifeless body, knowing that the cost was a guarantee of another baby taken, mutilated, killed?

And what of the soldiers? These beautiful, beautiful boys and girls whose parents and brothers, whose sisters and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and I’ll-be-your-forever-persons gave all. For victory? Of course we will keep giving. But what is victory?

To be able to tell the parents of the children who live around the Gaza border and the Northern border — to look them in the eye and say, “When you tuck your children in at night and say, ‘You are safe. You are home.’ You can mean it.”

How can we do that when the missiles have never stopped, not in Sderot and not in Metula?

And they are gearing up in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), ready to party party with their breatherns whose families have been on the pay-to-slay payrolls for decades.

As I am writing, I keep checking my Chrome tabs for i24 News and Times of Israel — are there helicopters? Lines of flag-holding friends and family given notice a few moments ago — on the ready to greet their forever person who is coming back from hell a miracle — the redemption of the captives.

First they were given to the Red Cross — those bastions of compassion who haven’t been bothered to deliver a bottle of medicine or provide proof of life for millions of hours of hell — practically the girls’ besties.

Then these not-really-human-itarians handed the girls to IDF special forces currently inside the Gaza Strip. Each one someone’s child, each one currently risking their life for hours and hours while waiting to receive the package of joy wrapped in a package of sorrow. Each one hoping they can be the one to tell the story for years.

Then the girls were taken by helicopter to the closest army facility near the Gaza border for an initial checkup, and then to a hospital to meet with their families. And then we received the photos and videos taken on a shaky iPhone of her hugging her mother, or the selfie in the hospital, but sometimes none at all — the worst when they can’t even share a momentary photo opp with a nation on the edge of hope and joy and longing and loss and pain but not victimhood, of fierce, fierce love for this country that is ours and all we have, a love we hold at exactly the same time that we hold a profound disappointment in its’ failures.

Every day that we read the Torah publicly, together we pray these ancient words:

אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה, הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה, הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם, וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה, וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה, וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב. וְנֹאמַר אָמֵן

Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress, or in captivity — who stand either in the sea or on dry land — may the Omnipresent have mercy on them and take them out from narrowness to expanse, and from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon!

As we all sit on the brink, may all of Am Yisrael (the Nation of Israel) be taken into the expanse of the light and to the ultimate redemption.

Amen.

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1. Grandmother in Hebrew