100 Days in Captivity
“Taking a break from the news, the constant bombardment of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, and zero-sum thinking is a luxury that our loved ones in the Middle East simply do not have."
By Abigail Pickus
One hundred days.
That’s how long it will be this coming Sunday that the remaining Israeli hostages, those who haven’t yet been released or murdered, will have been held in captivity.
It’s a number that’s hard to comprehend. We’re talking about over three months during which fall has given way to winter; Thanksgiving and the holiday season have come and gone, and we welcomed a new year.
And still, for 2,400 hours, 144,000 minutes and 8.6 million seconds, these innocent civilians have been held in darkness and deprivation, in a dystopian reality that never ends.
Can you imagine how it would feel to be trapped in this kind of hell? Of being alive but not being able to live, of being tortured and abused, of being frightened and hungry and thirsty and trapped in a cage, in a dirty room, in a tunnel, all alone. To never see daylight or feel the wind on your face or hear your mother’s voice. To not be able to hug your child or share a meal with your spouse or laugh with your brother.
To be disappeared – while you’re still alive.
I wanted to write about something else this week. We’re so bombarded with news from the Israel-Hamas war and none of it is ever good: not the fresh faced young IDF soldiers who keep dying, uprooted in the early prime of their lives. Not the astounding death toll of civilian Palestinians who, despite being put literally in harm’s way by Hamas, only continue to demand that the world condemn Israel for their fate. And not the hatred that spews forth like a geyser, rising and swelling and drenching us with finger-pointing and righteous indignation and vitriol that seems to never end.
How many of you, like me, are afraid to even look at your phone in the morning for fear of what horrible news awaits?
And yet, being able to take a break from the news, from the antisemitism, from the anti-Israel sentiment, from the polarized, zero-sum thinking, is a luxury that our loved ones in the Middle East do not have.
So we cannot look away. We cannot go on about our days as if our brothers and sisters are not suffering.
“We hostage families have lived…in slow motion torment. We all have third degree burns on our souls; our hearts are bruised and seeping with misery,” said Rachel Goldberg, the mother of 23-year-old Hersh who was carted off by pure evil from a peace-loving music festival on Oct. 7 – one of his arms having been blown off by a grenade.
Rachel wants us to remember that the real souls suffering are the hostages:
“And they want to ask everyone of the world – all the screamers, the indifferent, the academics, the passives, the righteous, the indignant, the haters, the leaders, the lovers, the every-single-one: Why is the world accepting that…human beings from almost 30 countries have been stolen and buried alive? Why are they being left buried alone beneath the ground in the dirt?”
Where is the world? – Rachel wants to know, marking each day that passes without her son back home with a fresh number taped onto her shirt.
How many more days can we go on this way? How many more weeks can we continue to let them rot beneath the earth without saving them?
“Ayekka?” Where are you? It’s the question that God asked Adam, after he’d eaten from the forbidden tree and was trying to hide.
Ayekka? Where are you, world leaders? Where is Netanyahu? Where is the UN? Where is the Red Cross? Where is God?
We cannot wait one day longer for our family, our flesh and blood, our people to come back home. Every day that passes we must remember to remember, or else they might not make it back home.
Bring them all home, now. We don’t have any more days left.
January 14 marks 100 days since Hersh Goldberg Polin and over 100 other innocent Israelis will have been held captive. The Bring Hersh Home campaign has launched “Hostages on the Heart” – a global campaign seeking 1 million people to participate in a host of actions, from taping the number 100 to your chest on January 14 and posting it on social media, to hosting a vigil, to joining an in-person gathering.
Abigail Pickus has written for JUF News Chicago, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and The Jewish Week. She ran the Nextbook literary series at the Chicago Public Library.
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