Early on October 7, 2023, Sasha Troufanov, a 27-year-old microelectronics engineer working at an Amazon subsidiary and living in Ramat Gan, Israel, found himself held prisoner on the back of a terrorist’s motorbike bound for Gaza. Both of his feet had been shot.
Troufanov had come to spend Simchat Torah with his parents on the kibbutz where they had raised him, Nir Oz. The kibbutz was burning now—the terrible black smoke of 396 looted and burning homes darkening a sunny blue sky. His father, Vitaly, 50, had been murdered by Palestinian terrorists, who were now hauling his mother, Elena, 50, and his grandmother, Irena Tati, 73, back to Gaza.
Hours earlier, at 6:30 a.m., Sasha and his partner, Sapir Cohen, 28, had been jolted from sleep. They sheltered in Nir Oz’s guest house while rocket-propelled high explosives tore across the sky. Not long after learning that terrorists had infiltrated Be’eri, a 17-minute-drive away, they heard Arabic shouts outside. Sapir rolled up in a blanket and wedged herself by a wall under the bed. Shaking, sweating, she prayed silently—reciting Psalm 27, the Psalm she’d been reciting daily for the past month. She heard the murderers go door to door, shooting, grenading, slaughtering; and she heard the screams. A vehicle stopped at their door. Its lock was shot off. Ten terrorists barged in, hurling furniture, wrestling Sasha to the ground—and then they unrolled Sapir’s blanket.
“In my pajamas, they took me outside,” Sapir recalled in an interview with Mishpacha. “Sasha, his face bleeding, was kneeling on the ground, hands behind his head.” Sapir was sandwiched onto a moped, between its driver and a rider, and driven, first, around the kibbutz’s circular main road, then the mile and a half to Gaza’s border. “The last thing I saw in the kibbutz was Sasha running away,” she said, “then I heard gunshots.”1
Terrified, as her kidnappers took her away, she prayed. “G‑d, please,” she cried in her head, “I never did anything meaningful with my life. Keep me alive; give me the chance to do something that matters.” She vowed to do something meaningful with whatever moments she had left.2
Across the Gaza border, she was paraded through a gleeful crowd of thousands who fought to yell at her, spit on her, and beat her with clenched fists. It would be 55 days before she left Gaza. In that time, she was Hamas’ hostage, at first shuttled from one apartment to the next, then kept cramped with other hostages on molding mattresses in sunless, damp concrete tunnels that reeked of garbage and crawled with bed bugs and lice.
When you see your entire life fall apart in minutes, when you feel utterly helpless and alone, when the long hours tick slowly by, when hunger gnaws at your stomach and your terrorist guards nervously eye your every move and finger their guns—what can you think? What can you do? What can you grab hold of to gain some kernel of strength and hope?
For many of the 251 people ripped from everyday life and taken hostage on October 7, 2023, it was a renewed sense of faith in G‑d that got them through.
‘G‑d Sent Me Here’
When Sapir’s captors left her in an apartment with a group of other hostages that first day, she could only think, “What if I had hidden somewhere else? What if we hadn’t come to visit the kibbutz?” “These thoughts overwhelmed me,” she later recalled. “But I just decided to stop it. I told myself: I believe in G‑d, if G‑d sent me here, I am supposed to be here; the only question is why.”3
Looking around, she saw men who’d witnessed their whole families murdered in front of them shut their eyes and lie flat, unable to face the horror of it all. Nearby was a 16-year-old girl. She was shaking, her eyes covered, sobbing inconsolably. “When I saw that girl, I felt that this was enough for me to understand why I had to be in this place,” she recalled in a talk in a synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida. “I decided to look out for her, to care for her, to make her smile.”4
A naturally shy and anxious woman, Sapir now found strength in assuming responsibility for her fellow hostages’ morale. “I started smiling all the time,” she said. “When a terrorist asked me, ‘Why are you so happy?’ I smiled and said, ‘I’m in Gaza, why not?’” She became the group’s cheerleader. She led games, initiated conversations, and cautiously cultivated connections with their captors, identifying anyone willing to slip them an extra morsel of food. So long as she could make her fellow hostages smile, Sapir was not helpless; she felt she had a purpose.
On November 29, Hamas released Sasha’s mother and grandmother, Elena Troufanov and Irena Tati. The next day, Sapir went home, too, released as part of a cease-fire arrangement between Israel and Hamas. The three men left behind watched her go with tears in their eyes. “When I came home, I cried for the first few days,” she said, “I felt so small.” Unable to help the hostages still trapped in Gaza, she was helpless once more.
“I wasn’t the same person I was before October 7,” she reflects. The carefree life she and her friends had lived before that terrible day now felt frivolous. “I had to find something meaningful to do again.” She began speaking—traveling to synagogues, Chabad-Lubavitch centers, and Jewish communities worldwide, to speak up for Jewish unity and support mitzvah initiatives in the merit of the hostages still in Palestinian captivity.
“I went through the worst a person can experience,” she said in January 2025, “But responsibility allows me to move forward. I have to be strong for Sasha, and for his mother.” By then, Sasha had been in Gaza for over 450 days.
Making Every Moment Count
Elena Troufanov and her husband, Vitaly, moved to Israel from Rostov, Russia, in 1998. Her only son, Sasha, was four when they settled in Kibbutz Nir Oz a year later. Vitaly put his technical skills to work managing refrigeration at the kibbutz’s dairy. Sasha enjoyed an idyllic childhood on the kibbutz, interrupted only by occasional Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza, and earned a degree in electrical engineering from Ben Gurion University. In 2022, Elena’s mother, Irena, joined the family from Russia.
Then the terrorists came.
Twenty minutes after being shot and kidnapped from the kibbutz’s guest house, Sasha’s captors dumped him onto the ground at the Gaza border. A crowd quickly surrounded the fallen six-foot-tall Sasha, hurling fists and insults as the terrorists hauled his wounded body into a car. Unable to walk, he was given basic treatment and, after a week, taken to a hospital.
Held in isolation and unable to communicate with his Arabic-speaking captors, Sasha reflected on his past. “In the [secular lifestyle] where I was raised, G‑d had no place in my life at all,” Sasha said in a talk in a synagogue in Palm Beach, Fla. But now, helpless and alone with nothing to do but think, Sasha looked back at the life he’d lived so far: “One of the things I realized I had done wrong was that I wasn’t open to believing in G‑d,” he said. “My life had been pretty good; I had a good job, a good salary, a great girlfriend—everything I had ever wanted,” he thought, “but I hadn’t been happy at all. I was always planning ahead; I didn’t focus on doing right in the present. October 7th made me realize I can’t control what’s ahead, I can only control what I do in the present.”5 He resolved to make every moment count.
He was also affected by his captors’ anxiously ironclad assertions that they were justified in their barbarous actions. “They were always finding things to justify their belief and their actions,” he said. He saw a reflection of their confidence in himself, “I had always thought I was right.” Specifically, he hadn’t ever given serious thought to belief in G‑d. Now, he decided, it was time to be open.
“It gave me strength to be able to pray; the ability to realize that, yes, I’m very sad, alone, vulnerable, but I have the choice to be sad and depressed, or to find strength to do things that will help me get out of here, and to find happiness when there isn’t much to be happy about,” he said.
Even in his pain, he found reason for gratitude. “It turned out to be a good thing I was shot in the legs,” Sasha reflected, “I wasn’t handcuffed, they gave me food at first, and, sitting there terrified those first few days thinking, ‘I’m going to die in Gaza,’ I had time to adjust to my new reality.”
After a stint in a Gaza hospital, Sasha was held in a new location, where he met the only English-speaking guard of his captivity—the first of many small miracles that he says saved his life. “In the 40 days that guard was with me, I got him to teach me a basic Arabic vocabulary,” Sasha said. “The ability to make a basic human connection with the guards was key. It meant they saw me as human, not just ‘a Jew.’ And whenever they had to decide whether to shoot me or save me, they chose to save me.”
On a Shabbat morning, Feb. 15, 2025, after 498 days in Gaza, Sasha Troufanov was released by Hamas alongside Sagui Dekel-Chen and Iair Horn. “All along, my captors told me, ‘Nobody cares about you hostages, Israel has moved on,’” he recalled, “So when I got to Israel, I was so glad to know that the Jewish people were united in caring.”
Upon his release, Sasha’s family rushed to greet him. His grandmother had begun observing Shabbat years earlier in Rostov—a commitment that grew from a close relationship with the Jewish Community of Rostov, led by Chabad emissaries Rabbi Chaim and Kaila Danzinger. Now, his mother Elena had joined her in its observance. To avoid traveling on Shabbat, both had both arrived together at his release site a day early.
For Elena, her son’s survival against all odds can only be explained by prayer. “I know the prayers of everyone, all those who prayed in the merit of Sasha; they were what protected him. I know this with certainty,” she said.
On the first Sunday morning of his freedom, Sasha donned tefillin with the help of Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, who had from the start advocated on the family’s behalf with the Russian government. It was the first time Sasha had ever put on tefillin. “Doing a mitzvah—making a blessing before eating, kissing a mezuzah, or praying—is a chance to feel gratitude and say ‘Thank you’ for what G‑d has given you,” he later reflected.
The Queens resting place of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, is the most visited Jewish holy site in North America, and has from the beginning of the war been a vital source of blessing for those most impacted, specifically hostage families and released captives. In November 2023 more than 170 family members flew there on a chartered flight to pray for their loved ones, and the flow has not slowed in the two years since.
Weeks after his release, Sasha traveled to the United States with Sapir, where they thanked G‑d and prayed for the hostages still trapped in Gaza at the Ohel. The couple announced their engagement in July 2025.
Holding on Tight
Two years have passed since October 7th. Twelve hundred Israelis were murdered that day. Two hundred fifty-one were taken hostage. One hundred and forty-eight of them have so far come home alive. Fifty-seven were killed in captivity and came home for burial. Forty-nine remain imprisoned in Gaza.
Among those who came home, no two people have had the same experience. Still, in their darkest hour, many of those horribly ripped from their lives and held in brutal and uncertain conditions found a reservoir of strength waiting inside them. Both during and after their captivity, some hostages took hold of the prayers and mitzvot they knew, and held on tight.
Keith Siegel, a 64-year-old resident of Kfar Aza who grew up in North Carolina, spent 484 days in Gaza. Kidnapped together with his wife Aviva—who was released in November 2023—he was shuttled from place to place 33 times. He was forced to watch a fellow hostage being tortured. He was kicked, spat on, and psychologically abused. Constantly hungry, he lost 66 pounds. He thought about his family: his aging mother, his siblings, his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. And he thought about his Jewish identity.
“Amidst all that hell, he wanted to remember that he was Jewish; that there was meaning to his people and that strengthened him greatly,” his daughter Shir explained to Israeli media. He found strength in the few prayers he could remember, for example regularly reciting the Shema. Before eating the moldy or burnt pita he was given each day, he recited the one blessing he knew—Hamotzi. When, from captivity, he saw an Israeli TV host reciting another blessing, Borei Minei Mezonot, live on air, he adopted it, reciting it before eating whatever other food he was given. Finally released on Feb. 1, 2025, his daughter Shir asked him what special dish he’d like at a celebratory Shabbat meal. To her surprise, he said, “What I want most is a kippah and a kiddush cup.”6
Choose Life
When terrorists took Eli Sharabi from his wife, Lianne, 48, and two daughters—Noya, 16, and Yahel, 13—and shoved him into a stolen car outside his murdered neighbor’s burning home, he recited Shema Yisrael, “Hear O Israel, the L-rd our G‑d, the L-rd is One.” He spent 491 days in Gaza. Bound in ropes and chains, starved for months on end with only a pita-and-a-half every 24 hours to eat, he refused to give up hope. Held for endless weeks in a tunnel with fellow hostages Almog Sarusi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eliya Cohen, Ohr Levy, and Alon Ohel, Eli did his best to maintain a routine. “We’d wake up, say Birchot Hashachar [the blessings recited every morning] and Shema Yisrael, and try to move a little,” he said in an interview with Living Lchaim. All week, they set aside a portion of their meager daily pita for Shabbat. On Friday night, Eli recited Eshet Chayil—thinking of his wife, his mother, and his sisters—and recited kiddush on water and hamotzi on the pita. “It gave us a lot of faith, and reminded us of our families,” he said. “It was very good for us.”7
Time and again, when the circumstances seemed to demand despair, Eli refused to give up his faith. “Every day we asked G‑d that our families will be alright, that, by a miracle, we would be released and come back to our families; and to give us the strength to get through this hell,” Sharabi said. “Day by day we’d ask, ‘Why is it not happening?’ and it wasn’t easy to keep this faith,” he said, “But we told each other, ‘It’s easy to believe when things are good; but it’s in the very challenging times that we have to keep our faith in G‑d.’”
“I’ll be back,” Eli had promised his wife and daughters on October 7. On Feb. 8, 2025, he was returned to Israel. “Your mother and sister are waiting to meet you,” the IDF psychologist said. That was how Eli learned his wife and daughters had been murdered. “I cried for five minutes,” he said. “Then I asked to see my mother and sister.” They hugged and cried together. “I knew I needed to choose; whether to let the grief bury me or to find a way to continue,” he later said.
Soon after his release, Eli asked for a pair of tefillin to wrap during prayer. On a trip to New York to speak to the United Nations, he recited kaddish and prayed for the remaining hostages at the Ohel, the Rebbe’s resting place.
“I didn’t choose what happened to us on October 7,” Eli Sharabi said in June, silently fighting back tears. “But I’ll always choose how to react, what to hold onto, and how to stay a human being when the conditions are so extreme. For me, life is choosing. And I’ll always choose life. The grief will always be with me—but alongside life, not instead of life.”
‘I Chose the Way of Faith’
Agam Berger, a 19-year-old violinist and recent IDF recruit from Holon, freshly assigned to a border-watching unit of lookouts at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, called her mother from a friend’s phone early on October 7. In the rush to take shelter, she had left her own phone behind. “Mom, there’s a terrorist invasion. They’re shooting at us. Everyone is crying. But I am not afraid,” she said. Then the line fell silent. Hamas terrorists overran her base. Fifty IDF soldiers, including fifteen of the girls in her unit, were killed. Her father, Shlomi, later saw Agam in Hamas footage. In one clip, she and other girls are lined up against a concrete wall. Agam’s mouth was bleeding. In another, terrorists march her into the dark canopied back of a military truck. But that was all. For two months, her family heard no sign that she was alive. But the IDF found her phone, and her screensaver read, “B’derech Emunah Bacharti—I chose the way of faith.”
On Nov. 26, 2023, a 17-year-old girl kidnapped from Kfar Aza, Agam Goldstein-Almog, was freed from Gaza. Moments after stepping off the Red Cross vehicle, she called Agam Berger’s father, Shlomi. “Happy Birthday,” she said, “Agam asked me to congratulate you.” Stunned, Shlomi asked if his daughter was okay. “She goes through ups and downs,” Goldstein-Almog said, “but she’s okay. She’s calm, and she calms everyone down. She braided my hair this morning. She prays a lot, she says blessings before eating, and she keeps Shabbat.”
Other released hostages who spent time with Agam in Gaza brought new details. Aviva Siegel recalled sitting with Agam and holding hands as bombs shook their bleak room. “She didn’t stop smiling,” Aviva said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “And her smiles really helped.” Berger’s parents learned that Agam was forced to cook and clean for her captors—but she refused to cook or turn on a fire on Shabbat, and she refused to eat non-kosher meat. Her mother, Meirav, was surprised. Their family was traditional, but Judaism had largely been a matter of values, rather than practical mitzvot. “I didn’t know how she was doing it—was she risking her life to stay connected to being Jewish?” Meirav said, adding, “It was her message to me and the world: that she is a Jew.”8
When Agam was taken on October 7, she recited Shema Yisroel over and over again. Dumped, bleeding and bound, into a shabby room in a Hamas commander’s home, she and the other girls reeled from the shock. “We had nothing but uncertainty,” she said, “At the very least, we wanted something to hold onto, so we could have our identity as Jews there.”9 She tried to pray, piecing together whatever prayers she could remember. She recited kiddush on Friday nights, but she’d forgotten a line, and it gave her no peace. Somehow, a Hamas guard left a Siddur [prayerbook] with them one day, and she treasured it for all the long months of terrifying captivity still to come—at one point sewing a cover from old pants to protect its paper pages from the tunnel’s soggy damp.
For Agam, keeping mitzvot kept her free. “I learned that imprisonment can’t overwhelm the inner spiritual life,” she later wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Even as Hamas tried to coerce me into converting to Islam—at times, forcing a hijab on my head—they couldn’t take away my soul.”
Together with fellow spotter Liri Albag, 19, they noted the date whenever they caught sight of a television. They missed their first Chanukah—the following year, Agam saved glue to light as candles—but managed to celebrate Passover by refusing wheat-pita and holding a makeshift Seder. Agam fasted on Yom Kippur, Ta’anit Esther, and Tisha B’Av. Together with Liri, she made masks to mark Purim.
Raised in a close-knit family, Agam knew she was missing her parents’ birthdays, her brother’s bar mitzvah, and the warm Shabbat and holiday meals they loved. Practicing Jewish observances was, in some measure, a way of staying herself. “I felt that, just because I’m in Gaza, that doesn’t mean I stop everything that I know,” she said. “If I could light the fire before Shabbat, if it was possible to keep Shabbat, why wouldn’t I do that? The realization that I could do it gave me a grip on reality—here was a decision that was mine.” She knew that Jewish law did not require her to risk her life, but, otherwise rendered helpless, these mitzvot seemed the only active thing she could do for G‑d. “I couldn’t get myself out of this situation, but I wanted to do something, to make an effort, to contribute some merit to G‑d getting me out.”
Seven of the lookouts in Agam’s unit were abducted on October 7. One, Ori Megidish, 19, was rescued by IDF soldiers three weeks later. Another, Noa Marciano, 19, was murdered by her Palestinian captors. On Jan. 25, 2025, Naama Levy, Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, who were all 20, and Liri Albag, 19, were released. Agam remained in Gaza alone for five days. On January 30, after 482 days in captivity, she was reunited with her family. In the helicopter to the hospital, sitting between her parents, Agam held up a message for the cameras, “B’derech emunah bacharti, u’bederech emunah shavti—I chose the way of faith; and in the way of faith I returned.”
On a quiet day several months later, on May 11, Agam and her mother, Meirav, traveled to America and visited the Ohel. Here, where heaven and earth touch, she thanked G‑d for her survival and prayed for the 49 hostages who still languish in Gaza.
“I don’t know how I would have survived without my faith,” she said, reflecting on her time imprisoned in Gaza. “In the end, that’s what gave me hope.”
Like Dreamers
Omer Shem Tov, an affable, fun-loving 21-year-old from Herzliya attending the Nova festival, wasn’t terribly shocked to hear Palestinian rockets screaming overhead at 6:29 am. But he was closer to Gaza than usual and could see the rockets. Then the music stopped. “Clear the area,” the stage loudspeakers announced. He and his friends, Maya Regev, 22, and her brother Itay, 18, lingered in the parking lot, then waited in their car as a traffic jam blocked the lone road snaking away from the festival grounds. Someone screamed, “My friend was shot!” All at once, they panicked. Omer, Itay, and Maya ran across open fields for an hour. Ori Danino, a friend Omer had met that night, called to say he was driving back into danger to save them.
In Ori’s truck, the friends drove until Hamas trucks blocked the way. Bullets whistled through the windshield. Omer tightly held a hamsa amulet his mother had bought him at the Kotel in Jerusalem, and prayed, “G‑d, save me.” The shooting stopped. Maya and Itay had been shot in the legs. Ori got out and ran. Two terrorists approached. Omer was pulled from the passenger’s seat and thrown to the ground, his face just inches from the terrorists’ truck’s tire. He was spat on, the terrorist’s knee dug into his back, and his hands were tightly zip-tied. Maya and Itay were pulled from the back seat, Maya’s leg was in critical condition. They were loaded onto the truck bed, six terrorists sitting over them. A few minutes later, they heard huge crowds cheering and celebratory gunshots, and they knew they were in Gaza.
The truck stopped. They were led into a small garage, into the gaping 20-foot deep hole in its floor, and Omer was walked, a gun at his back, to a tiny room and told to lie down. His socks and shoes were taken, and he was left alone with a single Hebrew-speaking guard. Omer’s instinct told him to connect with the guard. “I’m Omer,” he introduced himself. The terrorist asked him to sing a pop song, Omer obliged, and the guard let him sit on a chair until a commander entered and angrily ordered Omer back on his stomach.
Maya and Itay were carried in and thrown to the ground. Omer was marched off through the tunnels, then through an exit, through a chandeliered room with yellow couches, to a waiting car outside. “Now I could see the cheering crowds,” Omer recalled, “it was crazy to see the joy on their faces; everyone was so, so happy.”10 The car stopped outside a house. Omer was led inside and thrown into a garbage heap in the corner of a room with orange paint peeling from the walls. The door slammed shut.
Moments later, it opened a crack, three children looked in, and their terrorist father pointed and said, “Look, look at the Jew.” The terrorist’s wife and sister came to stare for a while, too.
An hour later, Maya and Itay were thrown into the room, wracked by pain. The bullets in their legs had been yanked out without anesthesia and gauze carelessly wrapped around their wounds. Maya, her leg seriously wounded, was taken to the hospital for treatment a week later. Omer and Itay spent 53 days locked in a series of rooms together, speaking in whispers because, their guards explained, the locals would kill them if they learned Jews were nearby. Omer made an effort to smile, and sometimes they told jokes. Before going to sleep each night, Omer talked to G‑d.
“I always believed in G‑d,” Omer said. “But I didn’t keep kosher, I didn’t wrap tefillin every morning—now I started to connect.” “How are you, G‑d?” he’d ask each night, “How was your day?” Then he’d thank G‑d for the bit of food he had, the air in his lungs, for having Itay with him, for keeping his family safe in Israel, and then he’d ask for everything he needed: “Give my family strength; keep me on the right path; help me get home.”
One night, Itay was near despair. “We’re going to die here, we’ll never get home,” the boy cried. “Help Itay,” Omer prayed that night, “give him strength, make him believe that we’ll go back home.” Itay woke up the next morning, turned to Omer, and said, “I believe we’re going home.”
“Everywhere I was in Gaza, I saw G‑d,” Omer said. “When we were moved, we saw there was a reason.” Days after one such move, the cell they had just left exploded under a bomb’s impact. “I felt the protection,” he said, “I thank G‑d I am here today.” The guards sometimes brought notes from Maya. One day, she somehow sent a bottle of grape juice, Itay’s favorite. Itay drank half of it. Omer kept the rest, and each week, on Shabbat night, they covered their heads with tissues, recited kiddush, and took a sip.
Maya was released in a ceasefire in November 2023, after 50 agonizing days. Then the guards came to separate Itay and Omer. “This was what we feared most,” Omer recalled, “being alone was so hard.” After a full day without Itay, the guard told Omer that Itay had been released. “I was so happy for him,” Omer said. But being left alone was overwhelming. “I thought I was going crazy,” he said. He tried to hold onto some routine by cleaning the room, but he was forbidden from speaking, unable to do anything—utterly alone.
On his third day alone, the guard told him to gather his things. “Am I going home?” Omer asked. The guard just pointed down. Handed off to new guards, he was taken down into a tunnel, marched for an hour, and locked in a cell 130 feet underground. He couldn’t stand; it was too low. He couldn’t spread his arms; it was too narrow. There was no sound at all except the terrorists’ footsteps. And it was so dark he couldn’t know he hadn’t gone blind. He sat there for 50 days as his rations shrank from one pita to half, to one date-biscuit a day; his skin grew so filthy he could scrape the dirt off; and his ribs began to show. “That was my lowest point,” he said, “but my faith in G‑d became much stronger.”
He began each day with Modeh Ani, the traditional morning prayer thanking G‑d for returning the soul, then he’d speak to G‑d for five minutes. At times, he asked G‑d why he was there. But he came to trust G‑d simply. “At some point, I just accepted that everyone has their path, this is my path, and G‑d has His reasons for everything. And I thank G‑d for everything.” One day, he was too weak to stand. Footsteps approached. Omer prayed, “G‑d, take me wherever You want, it doesn’t have to be home, just help me survive this place.” Ten minutes later, his cell’s iron bars clanked open. “Get your stuff,” a terrorist said, “You’re moving—you’re going home in a week.” Despite his weakness, Omer could have danced.
Sections of the tunnels had collapsed now, so they crawled at times. After 15 minutes, the tunnel walls were painted white, and their dim glow hurt Omer’s eyes. He was taken to a big white-tiled room, the base of a Hamas unit. He was allowed to shower and given food. “I was eating like crazy because I was very, very hungry,” he said. The terrorists pointed and said, “Look at the Jewish pig.” “I was hungry, I didn’t care,” Omer said. He was told he’d return to solitary confinement. “I was bummed,” he said, “but I told myself, ‘G‑d gave me this day, I got to take a shower, eat something—thank G‑d.’” After an argument, his captors decided to return him the next morning. That night, an IDF bomb collapsed the tunnel leading to his old cell. Omer stayed with the terrorist cell.
The Israeli army was in the area. Omer heard tanks passing overhead. One night, he heard IDF soldiers speaking Hebrew through a ventilation shaft. After 27 days, the army withdrew. His captors poked their heads above ground and returned with a stack of Hebrew books, among them: a weekly Torah study booklet called Dvar Malchut, a weekly Chabad publication. Omer read the Torah portion. It told the story of Joseph, trapped in a prison pit, who emerged to become the viceroy of Egypt. Then the terrorists took the books away.
“I’ll do anything,” Omer told the Hamas commander, “I’ll cook, I’ll clean, I’ll make your life easier here in the tunnel—just let me have that book, the Dvar Malchut.” He also asked to keep a card bearing Tefilat Haderech, the traveler’s prayer. The guard agreed. Omer became their janitor, cook, and maintenance worker, and he read and reread the Torah pamphlet. “It gave me a lot of strength,” he said.
For the next 400 days, Omer was the unit’s slave. They didn’t beat him; they often threatened him, spat on him, cursed him, and bragged about the atrocities of October 7. He spent two weeks unblocking a collapsed tunnel with a crowbar. He did electrical repairs. All the while, he listened and secretly learned Arabic. He tried to keep track of time by recording dates in a notebook, but instead filled page after page with one word: “Hungry.” And every Shabbat, as his captors mocked him, he recited kiddush.
A ceasefire came into effect on Jan. 19, 2025. Omer knew he was on the release list. “They fed me crazy amounts of food,” he said. He was fed three meals a day, with endless chocolates and drinks in between. Then, Omer was blindfolded and felt fresh air on his skin for the first time in 450 days.
Two terrorists walked him blindfolded through the streets to a vehicle. The vehicle drove. Three other hostages were brought in: Eliya Cohen, Omer Wenkert, and Tal Shoham. They were taken to a house and filmed, then held in a tunnel for three days. “When they took the blindfold off and I saw them—they were so, so thin—I could only think of Holocaust survivors,” Omer said. Standing at the tunnel’s exit, blindfolded, waiting to be released, Omer heard Eliya Cohen quietly recite Psalm 126, Shir Hama’alot—“A song of ascents. When the L-rd returns the returnees to Zion, we shall be like dreamers.” Omer listened, then began singing it loudly. The three men sang it together.
They were driven aimlessly for hours and told that the release might have been canceled. Omer—who hadn’t slept the night before from excitement—fell asleep. He woke to a crowd yelling “Allahu Akhbar!” The three men were led onto a bizarre stage, forced to wave, smile, and—in Omer’s case—kiss a terrorist’s head. Hamas cruelly opened a van door and forced two hostages, their faces thin and wet with tears, who would not be released, to watch their release. The Red Cross, which had participated in the terrorists’ spectacle, then drove Omer to an IDF base. It was February 22. He’d been held in Gaza for 505 days. He saw Israeli soldiers standing on their tanks waving. At the base, he took a shower and waited to be reunited with his parents. They ran to each other, “It was pure happiness,” Omer said. “I want every hostage and every hostage family to experience that.”
In the helicopter to the hospital where his brother and sister waited for them, Omer showed the cameras a whiteboard where he’d written, “Everything is OK. PS: I want a burger.” When they arrived at the hospital, hundreds of burgers, ordered by Jews of all walks of life, were waiting for him. In the hospital and upon his return to the family’s home in Herzliya, Omer was overwhelmed by the Jewish people’s united outpouring of love.
Omer’s parents, Shelly and Malki Shem Tov, 52, spent months bringing attention to the plight of her son and other hostages held in Gaza. Shelly had spoken in television studios, in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, and at countless hafrashat challah events held across the country in the merit of the hostages’ return. After joining a Shabbat program for the hostages’ merit, Shelly had begun keeping Shabbat. And she visited the Ohel in July 2024, vowing to bring Omer upon his release. Omer prayed for the hostages still trapped in Gaza at the Ohel on May 25, 2025.
Back home now, Omer’s parents say he is more serious and more grateful. “Baruch Hashem, today I wrap tefillin every morning and I keep kosher and I try my best to keep Shabbat,” he said, “with the help of G‑d, one day I’ll get there.”
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