‘Years of Joy and Light — Now Extinguished.’
A wife eulogizes her murdered husband, while freed hostages campaign for those they left behind in Gaza.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Ohad Yahalomi was one of four murdered hostages whose bodies Hamas returned on Feb. 27.
“It has been a devastating day,” said Danielle Kapp Cohen, a freelance writer and editor in East Cobb, who has made it her mission to support Yahalomi’s family.
I wrote about Cohen’s efforts in this space last April. Through her mother’s sister, who made Aliyah 60 years ago, Cohen has three first cousins in Israel. One is BatChen Grinberg, who lives at Kibbuz HaOgen, where the Yahalomi family relocated after terrorists attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, 2023.
When Hamas terrorists invaded Nir Oz, Ohad Yahalomi sat in front of the safe room door, with its broken handle, as his wife and three children huddled inside. He exchanged gunfire with the attackers, until he was shot in a leg and an arm.
The terrorists put his wife, BatSheva, and the children, onto two motorcycles bound for Gaza. As Israeli tanks approached, the motorcycles veered. One toppled, allowing BatSheva — along with her 10-year-old and 20-month-old daughters — to escape. Returning to Nir Oz, they found their home uninhabitable and Ohad missing.
Thirteen-year-old Eitan Yahalomi, meanwhile, suffered 52 days of hell. The boy reported being beaten by Palestinian civilians, forced to watch Hamas videos from Oct. 7, and threatened at gunpoint if he made a sound. He was told that Israel had been destroyed, and that no one was coming for him.
Eitan was reunited with his mother and sisters in a Nov. 27, 2023, hostage exchange.
Grinberg told Cohen how her 12-year-old son, Adi, had befriended Eitan. Moved by her cousin’s story, Cohen set out to raise $1,800 — 100 times “Chai” — to support the Yahalomis. Through friends and family that goal was met in 48 hours. As word of Cohen’s effort spread, “Complete strangers were donating and donating generously. It was just mind boggling to me.”
Over 13 months, more than $38,000 has been raised, money that goes directly to the family. The 645 donors (some giving multiple times) have come from 202 cities in 27 states and the District of Columbia, and from seven countries over four continents.
Ohad Yahalomi was buried March 5 in the cemetery at Nir Oz. In her tearful eulogy, BatSheva Yahalomi said: “Ohad, my love, 16 years together — of being an anchor, of growth, of love. Years of joy and light — now extinguished. And I wander in the shadows, groping, trying to figure out how to move forward without you. You are missing in every decision, in everything we do . . . I love you. I hope that when the time comes, we will be together again. Farewell, love of my life.”
Five days before Ohad Yahalomi’s body was returned, Tal Shoham was one of six hostages who returned alive, after Israel exchanged more than 600 jailed Palestinians to secure their freedom.
Just hours after Shoham returned from 505 days of captivity, his parents, Gilad and Nitza Korngold, were in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. “Looking into his eyes, after so many times I imagined this meeting, was worth every moment of the unremitting struggle we and you have been waging for far too long,” Tal’s father, Gilad, told a crowd of some 2,000 people.
A week later, Nitza Korngold stood in Hostages Square holding a poster of another hostage, Eitan Horn.
Horn was kidnapped from Nir Oz on Oct. 7, along with his older brother, Iair. Before Iair was freed on Feb. 15 Hamas recorded and later released video of the brothers embracing.
“I am very happy that my brother will be released tomorrow, but it is not logical in any way that families are being separated,” Eitan said, before crying on Iair’s shoulder. “Tell mom, dad and everyone to continue with the demonstrations, that they shouldn’t stop, and that the government should sign already onto the second and third phases of the deal to return all of us home.”
A distraught Iair told their captors, “You are now forcing me to leave my little brother here to die.”
That is why, on March 5, Iair Horn held a poster of his brother as he and other former hostages stood in front of the U.S. Capitol, before they met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
Aviv Havron, editor of the Shabbat supplement in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharanot, has written at length about his family’s ordeal. Three family members were killed and seven more were kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023. Tal Shoham was the last to be freed.
In an article published on March 6, he quoted Shoham as saying: “I feel like I left my brothers behind, and I am obliged to save them.”
At this writing, no deal has been reached to secure the return of 59 hostages still in Gaza —of whom just 24 are believed alive.
“We can and must get all the hostages out,” Gilad Korngold said at Hostages Square. “And we need all of you, with us, to make sure that no one — no one — thwarts the rest of the mission to release the hostages who are still suffering in Gaza.”
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