Nearly every day, Avital Dekel Chen sends a text message to her husband, Sagui. He was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 while she and their two young daughters hid in a safe room at their kibbutz in southern Israel.
“Please come back home. Please hang in there a little longer,” Dekel Chen wrote in one message.
Dekel Chen, 34, finds emotional solace in the daily WhatsApp messages to her husband, though she knows he won’t see the texts unless he is freed.
She is compiling an archive for Sagui, mementos of the year he has missed — including the birth of their third daughter. She remains steadfast in her conviction that Sagui will return to her and their children. But they have received no signs of life since November.
How do you give shape to days and months turned formless by grief? In the anguish of the last 12 months, families of the more than 250 hostages taken during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack have often turned to rituals for comfort and purpose.
Meanwhile, the world around these families grinds on. Gaza is devastated; the Israeli military has shifted its focus to Lebanon and Iran; a deal to secure the release of the remaining captives has never seemed farther away. In some cases, rituals have helped loved ones mark the passage of time, providing clear benchmarks in a fog of dread. In other cases, rituals allow families to escape time’s march and commune with the past — or the future.
“Bar is waiting for you,” Dekel Chen texted Sagui, referring to their 7-year-old daughter, who wears a T-shirt adorned with a photo of her father. “She didn’t stop kissing you on her shirt.”
“This is Day 300,” she wrote.
Ruby Chen tries to go to synagogue every Friday, whether he’s home in Israel or visiting the United States. In temple, he recites the kaddish, a Jewish hymn associated with mourning. He meditates on his memories of his 19-year-old son, Itay, who has been gone since Oct. 7.
Itay Chen was thought to be a Hamas hostage. But in early March, Israeli military officials informed his parents that he is believed to have been killed on Oct. 7, and that his body was taken into Gaza.
Ruby Chen and his wife, Hagit, continue to hold out hope that their son might be alive. They will not mourn him until they know for sure.
Chen, 55, has conversations with God about “fate and destiny.” But how does he reconcile the existence of God with the horror of Oct. 7 and all that has followed? “I think each individual does not decide how long he walks on this planet,” he said. “The question is what you do with that time.”
He struggles with the sense that there is “no structure” to his days: “In most professions you can identify progress. The journalist tracks the number of articles they’ve written. The dentist tracks how many patients they have. But with us, the hostage families, how do you measure progress? It’s elusive because we just don’t know.”
In such times of crisis, rituals can “anchor a person,” said Dr. Katherine Shear, the founder and director of the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University.
“In this state, it is difficult to see a way forward,” Shear said. “It feels like we have been dropped by a helicopter into a strange and very threatening place, and it’s hard to figure out where we are,” she said.
In the days after the Oct. 7 attack, Chen started keeping an online journal. He wrote entries that he hoped Itay would one day read, chronicles of his days spent waiting and hoping. He imagined his son’s future. Maybe he would come back and settle down with his girlfriend, the young woman he called “the one.”
But when Chen learned that Itay was believed to be dead, his frame of mind shifted. “I know the probability of seeing him again alive is not high,” he said.
He stopped keeping the journal.
Yehuda Beinin will never forget the night of Nov. 29. It was the night he and his wife learned that their daughter, Liat Beinin Atzili, was free after more than 50 days in captivity. It was the night President Joe Biden called and invited him to the White House. It was a night of relief and reunion, a collective exhale.
But the joy would soon be blunted. The day after Liat returned home to Israel, the Beinins learned that her husband — Yehuda’s son-in-law — was dead. Aviv Atzili was believed to have been a Hamas hostage, abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz like his wife. But military officials confirmed he had actually been killed at Nir Oz on Oct. 7.
The family was shattered. Liat was home safely with her three children; Aviv was gone forever. “We both rejoiced and grieved, practically the same day,” Beinin said. He has been in a “semidepressed state” ever since.
Every now and then, Beinin visits the websites for the Israeli news publications Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. He reads the names of everyone killed on Oct. 7. He reads their biographies, the accounts of their life’s work, the tributes from their loved ones.
“I often find myself going to the page about Aviv,” Beinin said, “and I just touch base with that, with my thoughts.” Aviv, 49, ran the garage for agricultural machinery at Nir Oz.
Beinin is not a religious man. He jokes that you are unlikely to find him in a synagogue. But he is nourished by the rituals of his life at Shomrat, a kibbutz in the north with a population shy of 700 people. Beinin, 71, a trained architect, created 25 acres of gardens there. He runs a baseball field and he is putting together a youth team.
Beinin is determined not to fixate on his family’s loss.
“All of us, including our grandson, need to function and not get caught up in grief to the point where it affects our abilities to function in as much of a normal way as possible,” he said. Beinin repeats again and again that it is important to “move on,” but “not in the sense that we’re forgetting.”
Beinin has become a vocal advocate for peace in the region. “In spite of the personal tragedy I’ve been through, I’m still advocating for reconciliation and mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Liat, 50, who declined to be interviewed, quickly returned to her job as a teacher and a tour guide at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust. Ofri, Liat’s oldest son, returned to Nir Oz, where he is working in the kibbutz’s agricultural sector.
“He has explained to me that this is the closest he could get to his father,” Beinin said. “That’s his driving force.”
Every night, when Yifat Zailer puts her two young children to bed, she also wishes a “good night” to 5-year-old Ariel and 20-month-0ld Kfir, who are believed to be the youngest hostages still held in Gaza.
Ariel and Kfir were taken alongside their mother, Shiri Bibas, Zailer’s cousin, from their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7.
The video of their kidnapping — Shiri appears terrified as she holds her two redheaded boys close to her chest — became one of the most enduring images of the attacks. Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were killed during the siege, and her husband, Yarden, was abducted separately from the family.
At the time, Kfir was 9 months old. He has now marked his first birthday in captivity.
In the short cease-fire in November, when more than a hundred hostages were released, Hamas claimed that Shiri and her two children were killed in an Israeli strike. But the Israeli military never formally confirmed their deaths — a fact that has left the family in limbo between hope and despair.
“Ever since Oct. 7, when I put my children to bed and I say ‘good night,’ in my heart, I say ‘good night’ to Kfir and Ariel. In a way, it helps me. … It makes me feel like I’m truly saying ‘good night’ to them every night,” said Zailer, 37.
If the children are alive, the family does not know whether they have the essentials they need or even exposure to the light of day, so necessary for young children to grow and flourish.
Zailer and her cousin Shiri were pregnant at the same time. Zailer’s children — 3-year-old daughter Daniella and 18-month-old son Guy — are nearly the same age as Kfir and Ariel.
Nearly every day, Zailer walks onto her balcony and looks for the moon. It’s 15 minutes to herself to breathe and process all that happened during that day, she said. It’s a brief respite from her painstaking work to free her loved ones.
“It’s the same moon in Gaza,” Zailer said. “Sometimes I think maybe she is, I don’t know, in some way, watching the moon at the same time, and then I can feel closer to her. … It’s sort of wishful thinking, but it helps me.”
“This is how I find relief, and how I share with her, and only her, what we are doing and how much we try to bring her back home,” she added.
It’s not known whether Shiri’s husband, Yarden, is still alive, or whether he knows that his family’s fate remains unconfirmed. As Zailer learned from other hostages, Yarden was told in captivity that his family was gone.
“I can only think about his soul,” Zailer said. “I want to hold him, and I want to hug him, and I want to tell him there’s no confirmation yet — and to give him that hope.”
The violent conflict that has upended lives across the Middle East has eroded so much hope in the region. But wherever possible, the hostage families have tried to hold on to it. Maybe the war will end. Maybe a deal can be struck. Maybe prayers will be answered.
“Maybe a miracle is waiting for us,” Ruby Chen said.
