When the Israeli Hostages Came Home, His Son Didn’t

Listen to What Next:

When Jonathan Dekel-Chen goes to Washington these days—and he goes to Washington a lot —he brings photos. Mostly of his 35-year-old son, Sagui. He wishes he could bring more.

“A lot of the photos that we’ve had for Sagui and from my other kids and grandkids were burned on Oct. 7,” Dekel-Chen said. “It was not just a murderous rampage and hostage taking, it was full scale looting and destruction.”

Dekel-Chen and his son are American citizens. But they lived on an Israeli kibbutz, Nir Oz. When Hamas fighters invaded, Nir Oz was one of the first places they went. Sagui has been missing ever since.

“I’d love to share all kinds of photos: him as a little boy, as a baseball player. He was one of the few Israelis who actually knows how to play baseball by virtue of my addiction to the sport. And he bought into it, thank goodness, when he was a boy, so I’d have a playmate.”

This is the Sagui that Dekel-Chen wants lawmakers to know. The Sagui who is so much more than a photo on a “MISSING” poster. Not just a baseball fan—he played on Israel’s junior national team as a kid. He’s also a tinkerer. He fixed broken-down farm equipment by hand. And Sagui is also a dad—to two little girls, with a third on the way.

On Oct. 7 he locked his wife and kids in a safe room and tried to defend his farm. When the day was done, he’d gone missing. The only reason his father knows Sagui was taken is because other hostages, people who have been released, have seen him. But that was weeks ago.

So now, Dekel-Chen is going door to door with politicians—in Israel and in the U.S.—to plead his son’s case. Urge them to send in the Red Cross to make sure Sagui’s OK. Urge them to bring Sagui home. After showing them pictures, Dekel-Chen likes to leave mementos behind: one of those “MISSING” posters of his son and a pair of these dog tags the hostage families have been handing out.

“It’s a powerful symbol of humanity really more than anything else,” he said. “In English, they say, ‘Bring them home.’ And then in Hebrew, there’s something that means ‘My heart is in Gaza.’ ”

On a recent episode of What Next, we listened to one family’s hostage story. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: You’re an American citizen. Can you tell me the story of how you ended up moving to Kibbutz Nir Oz?

Jonathan Dekel-Chen: I grew up in semi-rural Connecticut, a small town. I grew up in a community that mostly was not Jewish. But a fairly large number of Holocaust survivors and refugees from outside Germany settled there during and after the Second World War. And my parents were among them. My mother was a little girl when her family was miraculously able to escape from Nazi Germany in 1940. And my dad was a hardcore Holocaust survivor, having survived six years in Nazi labor camps and concentration camps. All of us kids of these Holocaust survivors grew up with a very strong Jewish identity. In my case, it manifests in this idea of eventually going to Israel and helping build what was a Jewish state, so I graduated high school and went on my way.

What did Kibbutz Nir Oz offer to you? What did you love about it? What did your son love about it? He must have loved it because he stayed.

He very much loved it. It’s a way of life. A kibbutz, for those who don’t know, it’s a small cooperative farm. In our case, a community of about 440 people—multigenerational—in which it’s a shared fate and a shared life.

You pool your resources.

Yes. And certainly in 1982 when I wound up there, it was very much that. It was a classic conventional kibbutz, where you shared your resources. Life was very thin in the creature comforts. But that spoke to me because it was this combined effort to make the desert bloom and to be there for one another in a very positive way, in a multigenerational way.

Did you grow things?

Oh, most definitely, yeah. I’ve held a series of jobs. After my mandatory army service, I became what I would hope to be an expert in irrigation. After that, agricultural machinery. And Sagui was one of my four kids. He really grew up in........

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