Dear Rachel: A bereaved mother's letter to the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin - opinion

Dear Rachel, 

We’ve never met, but if I may be presumptuous, I feel as if we could have. We have many overlaps, other points where we diverge. 

We both started our lives in the US, a clear center line down the highway of life. It stretched along an imagined US Route 66, extending smoothly from east to west with predictable and fungible service areas along the way. Life could be easy riding on the straightaway.

Our early years followed common wisdom. We each attended “good” schools, though already Brandeis showed your Jewish anchor, while my Jesuit school evidenced my confused Jewish identity. Israeli circle dancing didn’t draw me in, Motown and disco did.

We later broke with the familiar. Instead of belting out “From sea to shining sea!” as our soundtrack, we each lurched from the well-trodden road and went off track, rearranged our lives to join our people in our homeland. We dove into Hamakom, Jerusalem, the place where we sing “Hatikvah” (The Hope). Both our families are Israeli by choice.

Jerusalem became home, albeit at different times. We both have one son among sisters, we both sent our children to the Mamlachti-Dati (National Religious) elementary school of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, and we both sent our children to Kayitz Bakibbutz summer camp on Kibbutz Shluhot in Emek Hama’ayanot.

We both experienced painful ordeals. Here we diverged. Mine was a private one; yours was very public.

Your son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was horrifically captured by Hamas, his arm blown off, and was held hostage for the past 11 months. Our daughter Talia Efrat Abramowitz Zwebner was diagnosed with an aggressive blood cancer shortly after her wedding. Within three years, she was gone. Their too short endings bore no similarities. 

THERE MAY, however, be some similarities in what you and I experienced. For those three years, I would wake up from fitful sleep, sometimes sweaty from nightmares, and my first thought was always: “Is this real? She is still sick; it didn’t go away.” I remember wanting to scratch at my eyeballs to switch the screen. 

My (our) job as I understood it was to prepare and deliver fresh nutritious meals to Talia’s chain of isolation rooms, where she and her husband, Alon, mostly lived their wedded lives amid blood tests, the tangled spaghetti of tubes, monitor cables, and medicine drips. She ultimately shed everything, except her love for him and life.

You became an activist and were heard from every possible podium; wherever you could conjure the image of your son, you were beseeching the skies to return him alive, along with our other stolen people. You climbed every pinnacle; you dutifully wore a masking tape strip as your daily ritual humbly numbering the awful pileup of days in captivity. This devotional act is one that will always be associated with Hersh, may his memory be a blessing.

We Jerusalemites could not fail to feel close to you and your family’s crusade. There is nary a surface in this town that doesn’t scream out his name in graffiti or posters. Today’s Jerusalem is a silent testament to your efforts. 

My husband and I went through our ordeal together, but also alone. Our other four children and their dear ones also passed through this tense time. Only in the last few days did my husband and I admit to each other that we had silently and separately offered to God that we would change places. Take me, not her. Nothing happened.

The April night Talia died, there were unseasonable crashing thunderstorms; we acknowledged nature’s indignation. Sunday this week, as lifeless Hersh returned home to your family and the Land of Israel, the skies darkened with angry clouds, with atypical pre-Sukkot coastal showers. Perhaps this is more synchronicity.

We are strangers, yet your saga cuts close to my bones. Emptied, fragile, numb, and disappeared was some of how I felt when Talia remained at Har Hamenuchot.

The world's saddest club

RACHEL, no one can know how you feel now but you. I extend an empathetic hand as you join the world’s saddest “club.” No one clambers to get in, and you may feel strangely alone as you add this unwelcome and unsought role of bereaved mother. 

Where there is life, there is hope, it is said. Though Hersh and his fellow murdered hostages – off-duty Jerusalemite master-sgt. Ori Danino; Carmel Gat of Tel Aviv; Alexander Lobanov from Ashkelon; Almog Sarusi of Ra’anana; and Eden Yerushalmi of Tel Aviv – no longer live, they and the three newly fallen police officers (ch.-insp. Arik Ben Eliahu of Kiryat Gat; senior-NCO Hadas Brantz from Sde Moshe; and adv.-st.-sgt.-maj. Roni Shakuri from Sderot) became victims as terrorists ambushed them near Hebron on September 1. They together form a detail of emissaries to shake their fists above. Hope is all that remains to us below.

I suspect that Talia will find Hersh and the others as they leave one world for the next. Her ever-bubbly smile will welcome them, and she will gladly guide them to the best of what is beyond.

I remember the strange feeling after Talia’s funeral that it was the first time in three years that I wasn’t preoccupied with efforts toward her care in some way. My light hands oddly lacked purpose. 

May you and your family glean some calming closure, and may you, Jon, your daughters, and your wider circles prop up one another. 

It doesn’t happen overnight. Grief has its own pace; it can’t be rushed. It leaves its concealed mark on all; the bruises of having loved. Eventually, the purples give way to yellows and fade until unnoticeable. They remain tender and sore, hereafter your new normal.

Life is relentless; you will continue. The day will come when you find yourself reaching for masking tape just to seal a box. 

Min hashamayim tenachamu as the Sephardim say. May the heavens comfort you as Hersh rises ever higher. 

The writer is a Jerusalem artist whose graphic medical memoir, Life-Tumbled Shards, was published in 2023. She keeps a street photography war journal of Jerusalem since Oct. 7, 2023, We Have Nowhere to Go (working title). heddyabramowitz@gmail.com