Referring to the support shown by the British community during the hostage crisis, she said: “We knew that the British Jewish community was with us from the first second, honestly, we knew that. The whole hostage cohort community knew that.
“I will forever be grateful for that magnificent demonstration [of support] that continues to this day.”
Thrust into the global spotlight after their 23-year-old son, Hersh, was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, Rachel and her husband Jon Polin became among the most recognisable and compelling public faces of Israel’s hostage crisis.
Hersh, whose arm was blown off from the elbow down by a grenade during the attack, became one of the most widely recognised hostages. After 11 months in captivity, he was murdered by his captors in a tunnel in Gaza one to two days before his body was found by the IDF.
Goldberg-Polin said that what sustained her – and what others can draw on in difficult times – was “remembering that we are part of this rich and delicious treasure-trove of Jewish tradition, and to try to remember where we come from and who we are and to take pride in that”.
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Happier days: Rachel with Hersh when he was a teenager (Image: Courtesy of family)[Missing Credit]
Her relentless campaigning with her husband took them to mass demonstrations, interviews with media outlets around the world, and meeting with world leaders ranging from the US president and the Pope to Elon Musk. In 2024, Rachel was named to the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people.
Today, Rachel and her family can recall fondly the last Shabbat meal they spent with Hersh on October 6 – a night she describes as one “drenched in the blessings of ordinariness”.
“We take for granted the average, the boring, the routine, but that has been so absent from our life for these last two and a half years. That final evening we were together in our ordinariness is now a treasured memory,” she said.
She remembers Hersh – who had just returned from a 9-week-long excursion across Europe attending six different musical festivals – as “regaling us with stories from the trip.
“I remember in particular that he was sharing how he had this one tiny backpack for all of that time, and that he was justifying bringing only two pairs of underwear with him ‘because there are rivers’. I remember us thinking, ‘what does that have to do with anything?’
"He was a crunchy granola kind of a kid, and I guess to him if you had access to a river, you only need two pairs of underwear for nine weeks.”
Hersh in Italy (Image: Courtesy of family)[Missing Credit]
At 11pm, Hersh left to meet his friend. “He kissed me on the cheek, kissed Jon, hugged our hosts, and in the doorway turned around and said very casually, ‘I love you, I’ll see you tomorrow’, and that was the last time I saw him.”
Though she still prays daily – finding it “the only salve, the only balm that is for sure helpful” – Goldberg-Polin revealed that she no longer goes to shul on Shabbat, as it “became very painful”, not for herself but for others who saw her as a “symbol” of pain.
“Often times people seeing me either on my way to shul or coming into shul, they would start crying. I’m sort of a trigger or a symbol for a lot of suffering… which in turn caused me a tremendous amount of pain and suffering, to be the cause of [that] in other people,” she said.
She describes her book, When We See You Again, released last week, as a “pain story doused in love, or a love story wrapped in pain.
“This book is not a memoir, it’s not a tell-all, it’s certainly not a ‘I was here and now look where I am’ story about the trajectory of my pain, the resilience and healing… I wish it was, but that is not me. This is simply me giving over packages of pain, trying to describe my pain. I don’t know if I’ve achieved that.”
Grief, she has come to understand since Hersh’s murder in August 2024, is “a badge of love”.
She said: “I started to understand the reason I’m feeling this tremendous, profound mourning, loss, suffering, is because I so loved him. And then I realised if that’s the price, then I’m willing to pay it. Even though it is a very viscerally, angst-ridden, extremely Herculean weight to carry, I will, because it is the cost of having had this glorious relationship with this sun-soaked boy.”
