“No competition of pain with Gaza”

Hersh is a young 23-year-old Israeli and was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7: a few days ago the terrorists showed him alive in a video. Here is the story of the mother who continues to hope to hug him again and says: “There must be no competition between the pains”

BOLOGNA – “This is what happened: 251 days have passed since then and since that day I have been living on another planet”. She has a firm and composed voice, carefully chosen words, a smile that veils pain and fatigue: she is Rachel, mother of Hersh, a 23-year-old Israeli-American kidnapped on October 7 by Hamas militiamen. Together with three others he was caught, loaded into a pick up and taken to Gaza: he was at the Nova Festival when the militia attack occurred on 7 October. Together with others like him who escaped, he hid in a shelter measuring two by 1.8 meters on the side of the road; a small space, there were 29 of them. They found them and started shooting with machine guns and throwing grenades, those who were saved owe it to the fact that they remained under the bloody bodies of others. Hersh and two others were ordered out and taken to Gaza. Rachel ties up the ribbon of memories with precise and timely words. Her is the encounter that she opens the series of testimonies planned in Jerusalem by the peace pilgrimage led by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the CEI.

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With Hersh’s mother there is Dani, the father of another kidnapped, Omri taken away in front of his little daughter (she and her mother were saved unlike others who, he says, died in the Kibbutz near Gaza which was attached). Hersh was injured, losing an arm (‘the’ arm since he was left-handed), “this was 251 days ago and I’ve been living on another planet ever since,” Rachel says, displaying a day-count card on her chest. To ask for the release of his son walks around with a sign which portrays him in the square in Milan. “Bring home Hersh”.

Hersh had just returned to Israel from a solo trip to Europe to make friends, “he loves football and music… he believes in the positivity of life”, his mother describes him. “We did everything we could to save him,” she says. With their father they also went to Pope Francis, they showed him the photo of his son broadcast by CNN at the moment of the kidnapping “and he told us ‘you have experienced terrorism which is the absence of humanity'”. A light came on there. “Those words were what allowed me to believe in humanity again” after going through a phase “in which I couldn’t digest what had happened, his words turned everything upside down”. She Rachel says she is worried as much about the fate of the hostages as that of the civilians in Gaza.

“There is not and must not be a competition between pain, the dangerous and heartbreaking thing is that there is a competition between the pains”, he says amidst spontaneous applause, “everyone suffers”. Just five days ago, Hamas released a photo of Hersh, alive. He read a text, which had been prepared, and at the end he addressed his family directly; perhaps those too were “prepared” words, but his mother “doesn’t care, I caught those words”. Energy to hope, and not to give up “despite the feeling of being pawns in a game played by others, the pawns are the hostages and the civilian population. And the only thing to do is wait for those who started the game to put aside their ego and their interests”. Rachel also says she is “grateful” for the Italians’ trip and grateful to the Pope for the appeal to sign an agreement to put an end to hostilities launched last Sunday. In all of this “my faith – she confides – is the only thing that has allowed me to survive, without faith I couldn’t be here in front of you”. Zuppi assures her of his prayers for her. Dani, however, father of Omri, knowing that his prisoner son cannot shave, he has decided to let it grow until they can shave together. He too went to the Pope who he felt was close to him like “a father”; he, the parent of a son who lived in a Kibbutz 700 meters from Gaza; he who sent messages to his son while the militia attack was underway; son who survived, he says, an assault that spared the lives of “neither the children nor the dogs”; he, Dani, who finds “joy” in the salvation of his wife, son and granddaughter, mixed with anguish over the fact that there are stories of prisoners remaining in Gaza for years.
Five weeks ago Hamas showed photos of the hostages, including Omri’s. At that moment “I felt a kind of joy” he manages to say before hoping that “the Pope and the cardinals will make a joint declaration against anti-Semitism, which is growing everywhere: it would be important”.