After Hamas’s attack, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg wait for news of their son.
On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.
It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersch had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.
As Rachel stared at her son from across the table, she marveled at his hard-earned sense of ease. When the Goldberg-Polin family emigrated from Richmond, Virginia, in 2008, when Hersh was 7, he had initially struggled to adapt, to learn the language, to shake his sense of being an outsider. But here he was, vividly recounting picaresque stories of his time abroad. He said that the thing he’d enjoyed most about Europe was that he didn’t need to bathe, because rivers were so ubiquitous and he could always plunge into one.
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Geography, travel, and the endless wonders of the planet were his lifelong passions, and wanderlust his state of equilibrium. Before his bar mitzvah, he told those invited that he wanted gifts of maps and atlases. Although his parents never asked probing questions about the career he might pursue, his father imagined that Hersh’s curiosities might lead him to become a journalist for National Geographic.
At 11 p.m., Hersh told his mother that he was leaving to meet up with his friend Aner Shapira. He didn’t go into detail about his plans, but he was wearing his backpack. He kissed her and then left her to sip her tea and pick at the remnants on her plate of desserts, to savor the respite of Shabbat.
At 7:30 the next morning, Jon Polin left for synagogue. He’d been assigned to serve as that morning’s gabbai, charged with orchestrating the logistics of the service. On his walk, he heard the distant sound of explosions. A stranger stopped him in the street. “There is a strong attack in the south.” Polin thanked the man and went on his way.
Not long after, sirens began blaring, the cue for residents to make their way to bomb shelters. At the family’s home, Rachel woke her two daughters and led them to the basement. When they emerged, after the warnings abated, she decided that circumstances demanded she check her phone, breaking the prohibition of using devices on the day of rest. Two text messages from Hersh instantly appeared.
“I love you.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rachel knew that Hersh would only apologize like that for causing her pain and worry. She called his phone, but reached voicemail.
“Are you ok?” she texted.
And again, “Let me know you’re ok.”
Her daughters began to scan social media furiously, where they encountered videos from a music festival in the south, images of screaming youths, sounds of gunfire. Is this where he went? Rachel didn’t know.
Rachel sent the link to the festival’s website to Hersh’s friend Yaniv. “Are they here?” He quickly replied that they were.
Jon returned early from synagogue, where the congregants had agreed to cancel the remainder of services, after their third trip to the building’s shelter. But he didn’t have an inkling of his son’s peril until Rachel showed him the text messages from Hersh and told him, “I think we have a problem.”
Their laptops and phones, now turned on, began to unfurl the horrors of the morning: the massacres at the kibbutzim, the reports of hundreds dead at the festival, the others abducted by Hamas.
Another friend, Omer, took it upon himself to design a digital missing-persons poster, with a photo of Hersh and Aner, which he posted on social media and circulated widely.
Suddenly, there was too much information to sort through: so many horrifying videos to watch, so many eyewitness reports, so many text messages, except for the one text message they most deeply wanted.
It was strange that he hadn’t called. Rachel began to tell herself stories to explain away that fact. Maybe he lost his phone in the chaos. Maybe Hersh and Aner ran into the bush and were now walking the hundred kilometers to Jerusalem. Maybe they were in a place with no cell signal. Maybe, maybe, God willing, just maybe.
Then came the knocks on the door, as a cavalcade of concerned friends began to show up at the apartment. By 2 p.m., there were eight of them, working the phones, scouring the internet. They found a list of survivors clustered at one kibbutz, then a separate list from a different village. They saw Hersh’s and Aner’s names. But when the friends made calls to verify the lists, they learned that they were inaccurate.
As the hours mounted, Rachel knew that the stories she was telling herself weren’t believable either. There’s no way that nobody in the entire south has a phone he can use to just say, “I’m alive.”
Earlier in the day, Rachel and Jon had reported Hersh as missing. When the police finally called, they asked them to bring anything with Hersh’s DNA to the station. They found an old toothbrush and stray hairs on his pillowcase—quotidian traces of his life that could be used to confirm his death.
What felt like a breakthrough came late at night: The friends found a photo from a bomb shelter near the festival. Amazingly, they could see Aner standing in the doorway. And there was Hersh, along with kids wearing sunglasses casually perched on their head, some checking their phones. By Israeli standards, the scene looked strangely normal. They began to hear reports that the terrorists had killed hundreds of festival-goers, but now they possessed material evidence that Hersh could plausibly be among the living.
At 4 a.m., Jon received a message from a cousin. “I feel terrible sending this to you, but it was sent to me and I feel like I have to show it to you. Don’t show it to Rachel.” It was an article from an Indian publication about the murder of a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin, his body found in the West Bank. Jon felt sick to his stomach. But he also paused at the incongruities. The article noted that Hersh was a 25-year-old student. He was neither 25 nor a student. And how would his body have ended up in the West Bank?
Jon did show the article to Rachel, and she sent it to a reporter from ABC News who had contacted her earlier in the day and struck her as a sympathetic soul. “Please, can you send this to a fact-checking desk for confirmation?” The reporter said he would—and eventually, he relayed that his team had debunked the account.
After daybreak, Rachel and Jon called a retired police officer they knew. She told them, “I’m coming over now.” She drove them to an improvised police station, next to Ben Gurion Airport, set up for families of the missing—an ingathering of the dazed. They made their way through a crowd of hundreds of others searching for their loved ones. It wasn’t chaotic; everyone was too stricken for that. As Rachel remembered the scene: “It was like we all walked in with third-degree burns. That’s how the police were treating us. They were just so careful, and they knew nothing. So we were doing everything we could do, but there was nothing to do.”
At home, they heard about a girl who’d just been released from the hospital. In the photo from the bomb shelter, Hersh sat next to her, his arm around her. Jon and Rachel desperately wanted to talk to her, to glean whatever she knew about his fate.
Rachel called the girl’s mother, who said that her daughter was too traumatized to talk. Rachel responded, “I’m a mother and I understand, but we don’t know if Hersh is dead or alive, and your daughter might know something. So when she is ready, and I know she can’t do it tonight, please have her call me.”
At the end of the day, the couple told their friends that they wanted to get some sleep. But really, they needed time to themselves. In the privacy of their bedroom, they allowed themselves to say a fatalistic thing: We’re the parents of a boy who’s dead. They began to talk about how they might need to pick themselves up, for the sake of their daughters. It was a rare time in their marriage that Rachel saw Jon heaving, and witnessed the uncontrolled rush of tears.
The next morning, another survivor from the bomb shelter called. They placed the phone on the coffee table and put her on speaker. They asked their friend Rotem to take the lead in the conversation. Jon and Rachel, both natives of Chicago, spoke Hebrew with a foreign accent. Rotem didn’t, and they hoped that might make this young woman feel more comfortable reciting uncomfortable truths.
Haltingly, carefully, she began to narrate. The last time she saw him, Hersh was alive, but he had hurt his hand. The Hebrew word yad can mean hand or arm. And the way she used it struck Rotem as curious. “Was it a serious injury or did he just hurt his hand?” She replied, “He’s okay, but he definitely hurt his hand.”
After they hung up, Rotem called the survivor back, without Rachel and Jon in the room. He pressed her to be less cautious. It turned out that the Hamas assailants had lobbed grenades into the bunker. Aner had picked them up and hurled them back outside. And then she revealed the hard truth she had blunted earlier: Hersh lost his arm, from the elbow down, in the attack.
As Rotem relayed the information to Hersh’s parents, Rachel was beside herself. Hersh is left-handed—and that was the arm he now longer possessed. She exclaimed, “Did he just die in that field? Did he? How much can this child take?”
Rotem also needed them to know that he had collected an even more gruesome piece of testimony in the course of his efforts. He had spoken with a man in search of his own son. On October 7, he’d entered the bomb shelter and found seven young Israelis lying under a carpet of corpses, feigning their own death for four and a half hours. He told them, “I’m Israeli. I’m a private citizen. I’m here with my vehicle. Anybody who’s still conscious, get up right now and I’m taking you to the hospital.” The man told Rotem, “Based on what I saw in that bomb shelter, I’m sorry to say that there’s no chance that Aner is alive.”
With each day that passed, their chronology of October 7 thickened. One woman recounted to Rachel and Jon how Hamas terrorists had pulled Hersh from the bunker, his arm now wrapped in a tourniquet, and aggressively loaded him onto a truck. The police said that they had traced Hersh’s cellphone, and that they had last encountered it on the border with Gaza.
Although the government assigned them two case workers, the authorities seemed to have no independent sense of the timeline of that day, and no hard information about Hersh’s condition. Almost everything substantial that the Goldberg-Polins learned came from the investigation that they had conducted themselves. As the grim new reality of their lives settled over them, the couple made a calculated decision: They would push on every door. Whenever the global news media asked for an interview, they granted one. One American TV anchor tried to nudge Rachel to wear makeup: “You might make viewers uncomfortable.” Rachel replied, “I want to make them feel uncomfortable.”
Hope, or what now constituted hope, came in the form of Anderson Cooper. In the course of filming a long segment about October 7, the CNN anchor came across footage on the phone of an Israeli soldier. As he saw the video, Cooper gasped, “Jesus Christ.” He recognized Hersh’s face. There was Hersh hoisting himself onto a pickup truck with his remaining arm, his nondominant one. It was a terrible image: Blood was everywhere, on his face, on his leg. Cooper tried to break the news gently to Jon and Rachel: “I have a video of your son and I’m going to send it now. It’s a hard video to watch.”
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Still, they could see Hersh using his own two feet; they could see that he possessed the power to lift himself onto the flatbed, despite his loss of blood. Jon told me, “You live in a reality where you want to hear that your kid was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, because that’s better than the alternative. It frames for you the alternative reality that we live in, which enables me to take strength from seeing my son with a blown-off limb.”
When I spoke with Hersh’s parents via Zoom, they were in their apartment in the southeast quadrant of Jerusalem, sitting on a couch in front of an unadorned wall. Rachel told me that they had both lost substantial weight. The Jewish impulse to feed the suffering felt like an affront, which they both resisted. “I’m not sure if Hersh is alive. I am not going to be eating cake,” Rachel said.
They narrated their story with a sense of detachment, the numbness that allows the mind to function in the midst of a living nightmare. I noted that fact to Rachel, who wore a sticker with a 26 on her T-shirt, the number of days since Hamas had blown off her son’s arm and abducted him. She didn’t disagree. “I tell everyone that I’m going to go downstairs and cry now and that I’ll be back in a few minutes. And I’ll go into our bedroom and I’ll cry, and I’ll scream into a T-shirt, and I’ll just be beside myself. Then I’ll wipe my face and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got work to do.’ And I come back upstairs.” Each interview is a shout in the darkness, an exhaustion of their obligation to avail themselves of every opportunity to remind the world of Hersh’s existence.
I told her that I wanted to help Hersh get started in journalism, if that’s what he wanted and if he managed to survive. She thanked me, then corrected me: “Please, it’s when, not if.”
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