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Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s heartbreak when she buried her son Hersh was palpable.
Her grief was the culmination of an 11-month “odyssey of torture” in which she and her husband Jon pleaded with every world leader to bring her son home. Alive.
In every speech and meeting, she humanized Hersh.
Through her efforts, Hersh came to embody the hope of the Jewish people that the hostages would survive; that they would come home, broken but alive.
After 329 days in Hamas captivity, Hersh was murdered by the terrorists holding him captive — for no other reason than they would prefer to see a Jewish man dead than living free.
But unlike many of the other 250 Israelis kidnapped to Gaza on that dark day whose names have been forgotten, if they were ever known around the world, Hersh’s name will live on.
He will not only remain the 23-year-old his family described in their painful eulogies, but a paradigm of the young Israeli lives cut short on the state of Israel’s worst day, the Jewish people’s deadliest day since the Holocaust.
Comparing the Holocaust to any previous or subsequent event in human history is wrong, of course. It minimizes the unprecedented tragedy of the 6 million Jews whose murders the world failed to stop.
But just as Anne Frank emerged from that horror as the embodiment of youthful dreams stamped out for the crime of being born Jewish, so too does Hersh represent that for the victims of Oct. 7.
Anne Frank believed “people are really good at heart.” Hersh’s bedroom displayed a photograph proclaiming “Jerusalem is everyone’s.”
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Hersh’s story was familiar to so many.
One of us (Gil) met him when Hersh was 7 years old.
When his family moved to Jerusalem, Hersh regularly accompanied his father to the same Saturday morning prayer service Gil attended every week.
Coincidentally, their families’ connections go back decades in Chicago and its suburbs.
The fact that he was a California-born American citizen who loved music, sports and travel made Hersh easy to relate to for ordinary Americans.
He presented a very different image of Israelis than is often perceived, especially during the current war.
Israelis are too often dehumanized in the international mainstream and social media.
The Israelis the world sees are soldiers, or even worse . . . politicians.
Hersh did his compulsory military service, too, but he was kidnapped as a dancer, not a soldier.
Yet it is his captors who are portrayed as the victims by the media.
Despite last week’s revelation by the IDF that 6,000 Gazans infiltrated Israel during the massacre, it is the Gazans who for the most part are seen as ordinary people, not as terrorists or invaders who went from home to home in Israeli agricultural communities, raping, pillaging, murdering and kidnapping.
Videos published last week showed Carmel Gat, who was murdered alongside Hersh, as she was taken into captivity.
Dark, cloudy skies are filled with terrorist silhouettes who walk her by her mother being executed on the side of the road.
These images are reminiscent of the darkest days of Jewish history, repeating themselves again in the Jewish state.
Images are powerful.
They evoke visceral emotions. And Hamas understands this.
Realizing its inability to defeat Israel militarily, Hamas has adopted a long-term strategy of exploiting global media to shift public opinion and impact international policy.
Its army of content-creators publish images of destroyed buildings with a lone, pristine teddy bear atop the rubble.
Israel made a controversial decision to bar reporters from entering Gaza, in part to minimize the number of journalists harmed.
But when a journalist was killed, Hamas photographers made a point of placing a clean “press” vest on top of the shroud when they took their pictures.
This war is being fought on the media battlefield, as well as the military battlefield: Hamas is quick to spin propaganda (remember when the terror group falsely blamed Israel for bombing Al-Ahli hospital and the press bought it?) that the media is all too willing to endorse.
There is no time for facts.
And that’s what makes Hersh so important: His story, the hope he represented and the evil of his murder transcends the propaganda.
Like Anne Frank, his story will forever stand as the representation of lives cut short by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Gil Hoffman is the executive director and Jacki Alexander the chief executive officer of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting