‘I Need My Son.’ A Mother Becomes an Advocate for Release of Hostages

JERUSALEM—Rachel Goldberg-Polin numbers her days. On Day Seven, she spoke to President Biden on a Zoom call. On Day 37, she was forced to wear her hair down for a TV interview after she lost her hair clip. On Day 88, a college student asked her a question no one else had thought to ask: “What can we do to ease your pain?”

Day One was Oct. 7. That’s when her 23-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli, was severely injured in the attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival in Israel, then kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. “My son was stolen,” she says.

Rachel, who is 54, was a teacher and a mom when she woke up that morning, the kind who baked chocolate-chip cookies from scratch, then warmed them up individually when her children came home from school at different times.

But starting that day, she’s morphed into an advocate and strategist and a face of an international effort to save the life of her son and the other remaining hostages. She’s met with dozens of world leaders and executives, spoken twice at the United Nations, given countless interviews and had an audience with the Pope.

On Day 108, as she was walking to a gathering of hostage families in Jerusalem, Rachel collapsed on the sidewalk. As she lay there crying out, a young man trying to help asked what she needed.

“I need my son. I need my son. I need my son,” she yelled.

Each morning, Rachel springs awake around 4 a.m. (That she sleeps at all is thanks to the “horse pills” her doctor gives her, she says.) For an hour or two, she reads psalms or scrolls through messages of support sent to the Instagram page bring.hersh.home. When she gets out of bed, she has a cup of tea and writes the number of the day on a piece of masking tape, sticking it on her shirt over her heart. “Let there be good news today,” she says to herself.

And she does something she has done each day since Day One: “I make a concerted effort to act human,” she says.

Rachel prays the Jewish morning service, adding her own personal prayer, which has also become her mantra—for Hersh, for herself, for her husband, Jon Polin, and for their two daughters, Leebie, 20, and Orly, 18: “I love you. Stay strong. Survive.”

In recent weeks, the worst fears of some hostages’ families were confirmed, that their loved ones were dead. Israel disclosed that the toll has risen to more than 30. Other families got the opposite news: Two hostages were rescued last week in an Israeli raid in the Gaza city of Rafah. Negotiations over a new ceasefire and a mass release of surviving hostages have ramped up, and then down, not for the first time.

All these developments have changed nothing for Rachel or her family. They have had no news at all of Hersh since his abduction. And they describe each day as holding the same torment, the same hope, the same anticipation, the same sorrow. Altogether, about 130 families remain in that long limbo.

Rachel and her husband work 18 to 20 hours a day trying to save their son and the other hostages, talking to officials, giving interviews, speaking to anyone who will listen. Triaging out of borrowed offices at a venture-capital firm, they have a paid staff of three—a chief of staff, press agent and social-media guru—plus a group of 10 or so volunteers. Their efforts are paid for by donations.

“I am doing exactly what any mother would do if this were their child,” Rachel says.

Hersh wasn’t supposed to be at the Nova festival that morning. On Wednesday, Oct. 4, he went by himself to a different festival in the north of Israel, expecting to stay through the weekend. But on Friday afternoon, he called his parents and told them organizers of the gathering had failed to get the proper permits and police had shut the festival down. He told his parents he was going to come home, go to synagogue and celebrate the holiday of Simchat Torah with the family. Then he and his good friend, Aner Shapira, had plans to “go do something fun.” He didn’t say what.

At 11 p.m, that Friday night, Hersh kissed both his parents goodbye and told them he loved them. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

The next morning, Jon was in synagogue and Rachel was home with their daughters when the air-raid sirens went off around 8 a.m. She rushed the girls to Hersh’s room, which doubles as the fortified bomb shelter for their home. When she checked her phone, she saw that her son had sent two messages to the text string called “Hersh-Mama-Dada” at 8:11 a.m.: “I love you guys” and “I’m sorry.”

“I think he felt bad because he knew he was about to cause us tremendous pain,” Rachel says.

She tried to reach her son, first calling him, then texting. There was no answer. The family has learned what happened to Hersh that morning through eyewitness accounts, dashcam videos from cars that were nearby, and video from a GoPro dropped by the terrorists.

Hersh, his friend Aner, and two others rushed to a car and first tried to escape to the north. With Hamas terrorists shooting people in the road, they made a U-turn and headed for a bomb shelter.

Twenty-nine young people crammed into the approximately 5’ x 8’ enclosure. The terrorists threw seven hand grenades in. Aner, who stood in the doorway, tossed them out. The eighth one exploded in his hand, killing him. The terrorists then threw in more hand grenades and sprayed the shelter with gunfire.

When the smoke cleared, 18 people were dead. Seven were alive, hiding under the pile of bodies, which allowed them to escape being discovered. They became witnesses. Hersh and three other young men, slumped against a wall, were alive yet exposed.

Rachel has a copy on her phone of the video that was left behind by Hamas. It shows what happened next to Hersh. When she shows it to someone who is willing to watch it, she puts her head next to her viewing companion’s and looks at the screen long enough to point out her son. Then she averts her eyes.

The video shows Hersh, looking dazed yet somehow calm, pulling himself up onto the bed of a truck at gunpoint. The back left side of his khaki shorts is covered with blood and his left arm—his dominant one—is blown off at the elbow, with the bone protruding. He tries to shield his face with his other arm as people shout chaotically in Arabic.

How does Rachel get through watching this, again and again?

She repeats her mantra: “I love you. Stay strong. Survive.”

Rachel and Jon take some comfort from the fact that their son was physically able to get himself up on the truck. Yet they say that Israeli intelligence has told them there is another video of the same truck after it arrived in Gaza. They were told it doesn’t add any additional information about their son and would be difficult to view. They chose not to watch it.

The family says the army has told them that the last signal from Hersh’s cellphone came from inside Gaza at 10:25 a.m.

His parents have played every possible scenario in their heads, especially in their darkest moments. But they have decided to go forward expecting him to come home. “Hope is mandatory,” Rachel says.

She and Jon met at a Jewish day school in Chicago when he was in seventh grade and she was in eighth. They lost touch after high school, then ran into each other seven years later in Jerusalem, where each was studying. They got married in 1997.

Hersh is their oldest child and only son, named after his great-grandfather, as well as a great-great uncle who died in the Holocaust. When he was 7, the family moved to Israel, “to be part of this great experiment of a Jewish state,” his mom says.

He was a quiet, cerebral kid and a voracious reader, who liked to memorize the names of U.S. capitals and presidents. (His favorite as a child was Gerald Ford because he played football at the University of Michigan.) By 12, he had read widely about the Civil War, Native Americans and the Holocaust.

After moving to Israel, Hersh straddled two worlds. His extended family lives in the U.S. and he prefers to read in English, his mom says. But his closest friends are now Israeli. He fell in love with soccer and travel. He spent this past summer traveling Europe alone, attending six trance-music festivals in six countries.

When friends and family showed up at their house on Day One, after hearing that Hersh was missing, Rachel and Jon told them: This is not a shiva—the seven-day Jewish mourning period. We have work to do.

Right away, they identified a two-prong approach to saving their son. They try to meet every powerful person they can, to see if they can find someone who can influence the governments that are involved. And they tirelessly talk about Hersh and the hostage situation to anyone who will listen, including journalists, celebrities, social-media influencers and gatherings ranging from a group of African priests to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

“We will run to the ends of the Earth and talk to anyone,” Rachel says. “We don’t know what the stone is that needs to be unturned.”

Rachel has become active on Instagram, where the page dedicated to bringing Hersh home now has more than 90,000 followers. (She wasn’t on Instagram in what she calls “The Before,” prior to Oct. 7.) She’s filmed videos where she asks people to write their political leaders and talks about her concern and heartbreak over the innocent Gazan civilians who are also suffering terribly.

In a clip shot on Day 60, she asks “Where are the women? Where are the mothers?” Then she makes a point that she’s also made to many of the people she’s met: If there were mothers in the rooms where big decisions about the fate of people were being made, the dynamics of the discussions would be very different. “I think everyone at the negotiating table and in the war room, tomorrow they should send their mothers instead of them,” she says in the clip.

Rachel and Jon often tag-team their events. That way one can pick up the slack when the other’s emotional energy sags.

At a talk last week to a group of Orthodox Jews visiting from Chicago, on the night that the two hostages were rescued, Jon, 53, looked bereft and Rachel seemed tired but animated. When she started by telling her audience: “We absolutely love being in a room with people who all have the right accent,” she got a laugh. Some in the crowd knew Jon’s mother from back in the States.

They played a three-minute video, called “Planet of Tears,” that lays out what happened to Hersh and includes shots of the footage of him climbing onto the Hamas truck. Rachel stared at the wall as it played, chanting her mantra to herself. When a man asked if the rescue gave them hope and if they have any indication if their son is alive, Jon sighed heavily. Yes, he and Rachel felt blessed that hostages had been rescued, after no good news for 80 days.

But they have had no word at all about their son or his condition. “No one who has been released has seen the guy with one arm,” Jon says.

People often ask Rachel how she goes on. Her answer is simple: She has no choice. “I can’t drop dead from grief and sorrow, because he is going to come back and he needs his mother,” she says.

She has two other children who need her, too. Leebie, who teaches kindergarten to Israeli children displaced by the war, and Orly, who is in high school. The sisters laugh when they talk about the pranks their brother likes to play. A few days after the attack, Orly felt something uncomfortable in her pillow. It was a red bouncy ball Hersh had stuffed in there.

The daughters aren’t surprised by their mother’s poise and resolve. “I think she was always like this, she just never knew how to use it,” Leebie says. When they were preparing for their bat mitzvahs, Rachel made them practice their speeches, while she stood across the room and called out: “I can’t hear you.”

“She always told us: ‘Don’t just speak. You have to tell a story,’” Leebie says.

They think Hersh will be surprised that his mom, who used to get nervous giving speeches, addressed the United Nations.

“He doesn’t know you’re a kick-ass mom,” Leebie has told her mother.

And yet the personal toll is steep. There is a long list of things that Rachel doesn’t allow herself to do while her son is in captivity, including socializing, wearing makeup or her hair down, eating sweets, doing crossword puzzles—she used to do them with Hersh—and listening to music. Because she believes her son isn’t being fed properly, she eats one meal a day, which she consumes quickly, without looking at the food.

“It feels perverse,” she says.

Nights are the hardest. Often, despite the sleeping pills, she wakes up around 2 a.m. and needs to force herself not to picture where her son is. For solace, she scrolls through the messages of support her social-media director has forwarded to her. People have written poems, recorded songs, drawn paintings of her son and of her, and sent photos of themselves wearing a piece of masking tape with the number of the day on it. At Christmas, the family received pictures from around the world of holiday tables with an empty seat saved for Hersh and of midnight masses with his name on the altar.

Rachel also talks to her son—and listens for his reply. When the large, red “Bring Hersh Home” banner that hangs on her balcony flew up in the wind recently and banged repeatedly against her window, she took it as a signal from him that he was fighting hard to get home and was knocking on her door.

“Come on, Hersh, come home, come home,” she told him, standing alone in her living room. “Keep fighting. Stay strong.”

Rachel doesn’t allow herself to envision his release. It’s too painful, because she knows he will need to heal.

But she does conjure up joyous scenes further in the future. She imagines Hersh at his wedding, being lifted into the air on a chair, according to Jewish tradition, laughing and raising his prosthetic arm. And she pictures herself holding his baby.

“I want the privilege of all three of my children burying me,” she says.

Yet for now she wakes up every day, says her prayers, and writes another number on a small piece of masking tape.

Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected]