Hamas executed her son. Faith sustains her. Can a grieving mother help others heal?

JERUSALEM — Kravitz Office Supply store is a rainbow-colored world of paper, notebooks and pens. Winnie-the-Pooh backpacks. Felix the Cat water bottles. Stacks of printers.   The masking tape Rachel Goldberg-Polin needs is here somewhere.  There’s a specific type that works best. Only three shops in Jerusalem carry the generic beige rolls that bundle, hold and seal. The ones that don’t peel off fabric that’s not 100% cotton. And they need to be about an inch wide, enough for the numbers to pop.  The numbers, which she writes in black sharpie, count the days of a brutal war that began Oct. 7, 2023. They count the days since Goldberg-Polin’s son, Hersh, was kidnapped by Hamas. They didn’t stop when he was executed on day 328.  The store offers single rolls or packs of three. Goldberg-Polin is a one-roll-at-a-time person.   There’s no buying an extra roll at this local office supply shop in Talpiyot, near where she lives. Or spreading them around the house. Or putting one inside a carry-on just in case.  That would be planning for the war to go on, and she’s determined to do all she can to make it stop.  For the first 330 days, Goldberg-Polin fought to save her son’s life, not knowing he was executed on day 328. She took planes. She made speeches. She mixed with global elites in Davos, Switzerland, and took the stage at the Democratic National Convention. She met with Congressional Republicans. Traveled to every continent short of Africa, Antarctica and South America. Had an audience with Pope Francis. She met with world leaders, even some who scared her, in undisclosed and far-flung locations. (One time, she was so afraid, she wrote down part of Psalm 118 – God is with me, I shall not fear… – on a piece of paper and stuffed it in her bra.)

Some of the rolls of masking tape went faster than others, especially when Goldberg-Polin was running around the world trying to save Hersh. More meetings meant more people. And more people meant more masking tape, more numbers stuck to the chests of anyone who would allow it.  The news of her 23-year-old son’s execution shocked and despaired the world. But it broke his mother.   On Sept. 2, 2024 – day 332 – she buried her son. Goldberg-Polin pleaded with him: “I need you to help us stay strong. I need you to help us survive.”   With her demure demeanor and lithe frame, Goldberg-Polin is walking a fraught path. At 55, she is perhaps the most recognizable face of all of Israel’s hostage families at a time when not all of those hostages are home. Her appeal has grown beyond the Jewish world. The families of all kinds of victims reach out to her for consolation: not just murders, but kids lost to suicide and overdoses from Idaho to Venezuela.   Two years after Goldberg-Polin was thrust into this grief-stricken spotlight, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 66,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. As it ticks ever higher, Goldberg-Polin is left to wonder: Where does she go from here?  Israel’s political and cultural fractures are deepening. Antisemitism is on the rise worldwide. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the world’s only Jewish state is increasingly seen as an international pariah because of the scale of Palestinian deaths in Gaza.   A pending peace plan announced by the White House in late September could end the war and see the 48 remaining hostages – 20 presumed still alive – returned.  But Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says the number one problem in Israel today is not Hamas. It is inner division. “And if you think, ‘Who can heal this rift?’” he asks, “The last person is Benjamin Netanyahu.”  Could it be a grieving mother?  Still, it is here, in a Kravitz middle aisle, on a low shelf, near the dust and dirt on the floor, where roll 7 came from.   She tears another piece of tape and places it over her heart.

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Chapter one: ‘All the boys in the world come from women’

“In modern Hebrew, the word for ‘crisis’ is the same as the biblical word for ‘birth pangs,'” Goldberg-Polin says.  “Mashber,” or מַשְׁבֵּר.   Goldberg-Polin gave birth to her first child on a sunny blue day in 2000 in Berkeley, California.  She and her husband, Jon, had agreed the baby’s gender should be a surprise. After all, “there’s so few surprises left in the world,” he told her.   The doctor’s revelation shocked her: It’s a boy.  “And I thought, ‘How is that possible? I’m a girl,’” Goldberg-Polin says. “And Doctor Wharton said, ‘Rachel, all boys in the world come out of women.’”

The Polins would come to have two other children, both girls. They lived in Richmond, Virginia, in a brick colonial house with a picket fence in the backyard and two cars in the driveway. She taught Judaic studies to adults in their small Jewish community. It was the kind of place where she’d send her husband, Jon, to the grocery store, and the neighbors would carry the milk back to the car for him.   The family picked up and moved to Israel in 2008. They wanted to see what it would be like to get “on the ride of being part of the Jewish people who have the opportunity to live in a Jewish homeland, which in Jewish history was not an option for thousands of years,” Goldberg-Polin explains.   Three years earlier, Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza. The year after that, Hamas had taken control of the enclave after violently wrestling it away from western-backed Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian political factions that grew out of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Movement in the 1950s.   The year Goldberg-Polin and her family arrived in Israel, the country launched Operation Cast Lead, a massive military operation aimed at halting intensifying Hamas mortar, missile and rocket fire terrorizing southern Israeli communities. Approximately 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died in the operation, which lasted 22 days, according to aid groups.   Relocating to a war-torn country the size of New Jersey with three children was a bold move. Yet it’s one Jews around the world have made for a host of reasons since the creation of the state in 1948: Faith and family, a sense of connection to the promise of a Jewish state, a refuge from antisemitism. Or as Goldberg-Polin puts it: “an experiment.”

And boldness is nothing new for Goldberg-Polin.

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Even growing up in 1970s and ’80s Chicago, Goldberg-Polin decisions were always accompanied by fundamental questions. After her parents divorced, she took on orthodox Jewish observance. On the Sabbath, she stopped going to movies or shopping, and she didn’t use the phone.   The move into orthodoxy, Goldberg-Polin says, taught her the “preciousness of having meaning in my life as a 13-year-old.”  Goldberg-Polin was enthralled with the ritual and the comfort she found in this new way of living: “There was an entire way of going about life infused with meaning. And a quest for holiness in the mundane.”  Camille Kahn met Goldberg-Polin when they were both 18, on a gap year in Israel. Over the years, Kahn has seen her friend’s spirituality and connection to others deepen.  “She somehow transmits her emotion, and you feel it, and you become part of it,” Kahn says.

As a young mother, Goldberg-Polin was back in her biblical homeland, with her family, on an adventure. Her daughters adjusted quickly. But the move was hard on Hersh, a 7-year-old who had loved his first-grade teacher in Virginia.  For a whole year, Hersh didn’t utter a single word in his new class, where the teacher recited lessons in modern Hebrew. Instead, he sat silently for hours, reading books in English.   Then one day, the teacher asked if anyone knew about the Holocaust. Hersh raised his hand, and in Hebrew told the story of a survivor he’d known back in Richmond.   Hersh would grow up to be very much Goldberg-Polin’s son. He’d advocate at 14 for the release of an Ethiopian-Israeli hostage held in Gaza, and for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. He even had a colorful poster of the Old City skyline on his desk, emblazoned with the words, “Jerusalem belongs to everyone.”

“He wasn’t perfect,” Goldberg-Polin says. “But I always say he was the perfect son for me.”   That confluence and flurry of memories are part of the before. Five decades that can be summed up in an instant. Because everything changed that morning in 2023, when Hamas launched the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. More than 3,000 Hamas fighters gunned down civilians, torturing and mutilating some of them in their own homes, still in their pajamas.   That Saturday, Hersh was at an open-air concert for what was billed as a celebration of “unity and love.” She expected him home soon afterward. Instead, he was taken from her.

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As Goldberg-Polin readied for the fight of her life, she remembered the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when 52 people were held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days. She recalled being transfixed as a kid when ABC News opened the newscast every night with a tally of how many days they had been there.  She needed to count, too. She decided this would be her new identity: “Every day, my name would change to a new number.”   Goldberg-Polin wanted to use the stickers that say, ‘HELLO MY NAME IS,’ but they were nowhere to be found in Israel.  So she settled for masking tape. She needed masking tape.  She pulled roll number one from the kitchen drawer and tore the very first piece.

Chapter two: Finding her ‘what’

In the Torah, God didn’t forsake Rachel when she realized she was barren. He listened to her and opened her womb.

That’s how Goldberg-Polin, who shares a first name with the Biblical matriarch, knows there’s a “why.”

Why her first child was a son. Why Hersh wasn’t among those to escape from the Nova music festival, but instead had his left arm blown off and was taken hostage. Why he was swallowed up by Gazan tunnels, where he faced starvation, torture and darkness.   Why he was executed on day 328, point blank, at the hands of Hamas, hours before approaching Israel Defense Forces would have set him free.   “I hate to break it to everybody, nobody gets out of here alive,” she says, the tape on her chest marked with 642. “This is the way that this world works.”  As she called out to God for help, Goldberg-Polin didn’t dwell on the why. She has a more urgent question: “I know that there’s a reason for all of this. I might never be privy to the why, but I know there’s a why. My question is, what? What do you want me to do? Because I’ll do it.”

She’s not the first to ponder this. It’s a conundrum contemplated by everyone from 12-step alcoholics to sages throughout time.

The Catholic Saint Thomas Aquinas addressed it this way: “The things we love tell us who we are.”

Buddha’s teaching in the Pali Canon reads: “Death has 1,000 parts…Only one part is your life.”

But for Goldberg-Polin, the words of Jewish sage Maimonides resonate the most: “What is the purpose thereof?”  Hersh thought about it, too. People who had been in captivity with him later shared with his mother that he often talked about “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Victor Frankl’s account of being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. “If you have a why, you will find your how,” Hersh told the others.   It is a phrase that continues to echo in Goldberg-Polin’s mind, as she makes masking tape labels for her family at their home in Jerusalem each morning.   The house sits on the edge of the Baka neighborhood, known for its leafy streets, upscale residences and lush, private gardens. Its quiet, tree-lined avenues are interrupted by coffee shops and bohemian boutiques.   Hersh’s image is everywhere in the neighborhood now. On lampposts. In shop windows. As a cherubic, smiling, cartoon character. Hersh’s face fills banner after banner. His name graces snippets of poems and songs graffitied in alleyways. “We love you Hersh,” says one. “We miss Hersh,” says another. The Goldberg-Polin’s’ own apartment balcony is draped in an enormous red banner that bears his image.   It was near his home, under a covered courtyard next to the family’s synagogue, where Hersh’s loved ones last saw him alive on Oct. 6, 2023.  “I remember standing here with Rachel and seeing Hersh dancing,” family friend Ayelet Haas recalls while showing a reporter around on day 704. “How sad this now seems.”  Goldberg-Polin rarely leaves the house these days. It’s impossible for her to go almost anywhere – in her neighborhood, in Israel, in much of the U.S. – without being recognized. Without being approached. Without strangers lunging at her and grabbing her forearm.  This is the cost of having been tortured in public. Her pain and her grief can’t be hers alone.   “My father is from Gary, Indiana. My mom’s from Detroit, we’re Midwesterners through and through. And my dad always taught me that when you walk down the street, you hold your head up,” she says.   But grief has made Goldberg-Polin keep her head down, because when people see her, they cry. She has become a symbol of the most excruciating nightmare people can think of.  Zev Alexander, one of Golberg-Polin’s oldest friends, says that while there was always a meaningfulness to her, he’s detected new determination and focus since Hersh’s death.  She lets no light in for frivolity – instead he senses in her an urgency to inspire others to leave this place better than they found it and to discover the point of this world and our place in it.

“This seems to be a mission and charge,” Alexander says. “It’s like she’s the whole world’s mom now.”

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Chapter three: A political crisis, and a moral one

On day 594, in May 2025, Goldberg-Polin takes the stage at Yeshiva University in New York to receive an honorary doctorate before 5,000 people.  She speaks with the graduates about her loss, but she also instructs them to heed Judaism’s moral calling to repair the world.  “We in Israel are at a crossroads,” she tells them. “We are bruised and battle-weary. Not just from the outside in but from our inside rifts. That is beyond dangerous, and it cannot be an option.”  Most families in Israel – a country of just under 10 million people – know someone who was caught up in the events of Oct. 7, or who has been maimed or killed as part of the military response.   In the two years since then, Israelis have been confronted with an endless parade of stories detailing how the hostages were taken, how they were treated and how they died. And they’re not listening quietly.  Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in major cities to urge, badger and beg Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, bring the remaining hostages home and restore a version of what they see as the Israel they cherish: humanistic and democratic — though admittedly flawed.  Netanyahu, meanwhile, stands accused of having repeatedly turned down earlier deals with Hamas to appease extreme elements within his fragile coalition government. Outside of Israel, he and other senior Israeli officials face allegations of war crimes in Gaza.

Goldberg-Polin has been critical of Netanyahu’s handling of the hostage crisis and the violence it has wreaked on Palestinians in Gaza. On the stage at Yeshiva, she’s a favorite teacher speaking in folksy anecdotes. Her words project a mix of quiet determination and strength in a way that’s unusual for Israel, where public figures rarely show vulnerability.  “One of the most critical things to do when anyone is lost is stop and own that we have made a mistake, and that we are lost,” she says.  “Now I know that is particularly hard for some men, especially while driving. This has been eased, thank God, with the invention of Waze and Google Maps.”  Laughter from the crowd breaks the tension of what could have been understood as metaphor for Netanyahu’s actions.  But Goldberg-Polin’s mission is to inspire. To end the war and reunite the remaining hostages with their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.  “We are not what we say, we are not what we think, and we are not even what we believe,” she tells the audience.  She pauses: “In this life, we are: What. We. DO.”   Applause.  “So go do, you shining lights of wonder. Go be our north stars. Go be our beacons. Go. Be. Our Hope. There is a whole world out there, awaiting your arrival.”  She raises both arms, punching toward the air. Her voice crescendos and her face colors as she refuses to let a sob overtake her battle cry.  “So go, you beautiful people! Go! And do!”

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Chapter four: The world to come

Day 703 without Hersh.  As Goldberg-Polin walks through New York’s Central Park, onlookers recognize her when they catch a glimpse of the masking tape.  Some wave. Others give her a thumbs up.   As a breeze begins to hint at the beginning of fall, she feels on another planet.

There is a constant separation between Goldberg-Polin’s petite body and how she experiences the world. A brokenness that radiates at a cellular and even cosmic level.   A close friend tells her that’s because Hersh isn’t here anymore. As his mother, a piece of her, flesh of her flesh – her son – is in olam ha’abah, the world to come.   “It gave me permission to understand why I don’t feel complete here,” she says. “Part of me is already in the next world with my son. One day the rest of me will be there with him. But for now, a lot of me is in this world.”  It bothers her that there isn’t a word for someone who has lost a child. It’s as if, even in language, we somehow understand that burying a son or daughter goes against the natural world order.

Back in a hotel room on Fifth Avenue, Goldberg-Polin removes her jacket and sits down on a couch to speak with a reporter.  There’s something about kidnapping that scares the fear out of you, Goldberg-Polin says. Throws out hunger and with it, her period, which never returned.  Three hundred and thirty days after Hersh was taken, her son’s body was returned to her – 114 pounds on a frame that once stood six feet tall, and now, had six wounds.  Underneath the shroud was proof of what she had always known as his mother: her boy starved. As she was jumping on planes, lobbying world leaders, hoping for his return, everyone had insisted she eat. But how could she?  The Israeli Defense Forces found Hersh’s body and those of five other hostages in a tunnel that was five feet high and two feet wide. Water bottles left behind were filled with black urine – a sign of failing kidneys and dehydration.  “I especially have a problem when I’m drinking clean water,” she says, a bottle of Poland Spring on a desk nearby.

Every returned hostage she’s ever spoken to has said they were only ever given dirty water or salt water.

Goldberg-Polin is in New York after having visited Detroit and Chicago. Soon, she’ll head back to Israel before returning to Washington the following week.  There’s a lot to do. She’s speaking to anyone who will listen. But would she ever run for political office?  One person who would welcome her candidacy is Shelly Tal Meron, an Israeli lawmaker for Yesh Atid, a centrist opposition party in Israel’s Parliament.  Israel needs more women, and Goldberg-Polin would also represent religious people that are more liberal, which the country also needs, Meron says.  “She has all the qualities that are suitable for this job. But it’s not an easy job to be a politician,” Meron says. “There is a high price to pay. She’s paid a very high price already.”

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It’s not a completely unreasonable idea. An Israeli pollster recently conducted a “viability” study to test how Goldberg-Polin would fare as a political candidate in Israel. It revealed high approval ratings among the public there.  The research, conducted without her knowledge, was commissioned by a potential political rival, according to the person who carried out the opposition research, who asked for anonymity because the poll was a private survey.   Many who took the survey saw Goldberg-Polin as too moral to get involved in the rough and tumble world of Israel’s fractious political scene. She has a hard time seeing herself in that world, too, she says during a two-hour interview in that New York hotel room.  “We would sit with so many people who really, I think, genuinely cared while we were speaking to them,” she says. Within hours of leaving, “we would hear these same people touting rhetoric that was so counterproductive. What we saw was … really dark, unappealing, unholy – something I didn’t want to be a part of.”  But even as she says no to politics, she flashes that folksy charm.  “And I also actually have no qualifications except that I have a pulse.”  A reporter reminds Goldberg-Polin she wouldn’t be the first woman from the Midwest with an American accent to serve as prime minister of Israel. Golda Meir, who was raised in Milwaukee, held the job from 1969 to 1974.  “That’s funny,” Goldberg-Polin responds. “But she was very knowledgeable, and we did have the same accent. Although I’ve worked very hard to lose (mine).”  What does a Chicago accent sound like in Hebrew?  Deadpan, she answers: “It’s not pretty.”  Two hours later, Goldberg-Polin is ready to go. She overlays a blush scarf on her shoulders and exits the room.  She leaves the bottle of water behind, just one sip gone.

Chapter five: Leaving the cave

The cantor stands to lead the congregation in prayer, which will be followed by a ritualistic chanting of Acheinu. 

Jews have been reciting this prayer – for the release of captives – for almost a thousand years. But for many, this is the first time they are saying it in the presence of Goldberg-Polin and her husband.

“Acheinu,” they say, beginning the call and response. “Just as our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt, may they journey from darkness to light, right now.”

Goldberg-Polin’s eyes are closed. Her lips are moving, but they make no sound.

Tears well in the eyes of those who dare to look at her as the cantor’s acapella vibrato fills the sanctuary.

Not everyone in the crowd is equally observant. They have come not only to pray, but to hear Goldberg-Polin speak. They’ve come from all corners of the city, and they pack a room and a balcony, blocking the emergency exists as they stand along the back wall.

They want her to teach them about grief, about loss, about hope. They, too, yearn for answers.

Goldberg-Polin sits in the holiest place of the synagogue sanctuary: underneath the ark, the bronze cabinet that stores Torah scrolls at the head of the temple. And she tells them God answered her prayer, but the answer was no.

“He just didn’t answer me (with) the answer that I think that I wanted.” she says. “But he answered.”

Their shocked reaction doesn’t stop Hersh’s mother. She tells them about her son and how he survived for 328 days because he knew his why and found his how.

She talks about her favorite prayers and her morning ritual, the way she calls out to God. She calls to Hashem, or “the name” in Hebrew, because Orthodox Jews do not invoke God’s name directly.  “I say, ‘Hashem, I am close to you, be close to me” Goldberg-Polin says.

As she utters the words, she puts a fist over her heart, over the masking tape marked with number 703.  The gesture evokes a line from the Old Testament often read at funerals: Place me like a seal on your heart. … For love is as strong as death.  The next morning, and every morning, even after the war ends and she peels the final shred of tape from her chest – from now until she sees her only son again in the world to come – she will close her eyes and speak to him: “Sweet boy, let me feel your love and your light today.”

Romina Ruiz-Goiriena is USA TODAY’s Executive Editor of Investigations and Storytelling and a former international correspondent. She reported from New York. Follow her on X, @RominaAdi.

Kim Hjelmgaard is USA TODAY’s World Correspondent and reported this dispatch from Jerusalem. He can be reached at on Signal at kimusat12.01.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rachel Goldberg Polin counts the days since Hamas took her son