The heartache of calling Israel home

I KNEW THAT AS SOON AS WE CAME HOME TO ISRAEL, I'd ask myself why we'd been so eager to get back. I'd disconnected for a few days in New York City with my family, even stopped wearing the hostage necklace I wore every day, and I knew it would be hard to return.

- DANYA KAUFMANN

What I didn't know was that the day we got back I'd hear that the bodies of six young hostages had been found, shot by Hamas shortly before the Israel Defense Force (IDF) got to them.

In the weeks following Oct. 7, I couldn't hear anything about the atrocities without breaking down. I was a new mother, only beginning to understand my role protecting the world's most precious person, and it all felt too raw, too horrifying, too close. I walked out of rooms when people started talking. I watched no TV and avoided unnecessary news, shut down social media. I even averted my eyes in the street when I caught sight of the red letters on the hostage posters, name and age at the top, and BRING HIM/HER HOME NOW! printed beneath a smiling photograph.

After some weeks had passed, and the radio started playing regular songs and not only sad ones, I let myself look up at one of the posters, into the eyes of a hostage. Alex Lobanov. He wore an apron and stood next to a lemonade dispenser and smiled at me. The simplicity of the scene, contrasted with where I knew he was now, twisted my stomach. I thought of his mother.

At an intersection by my house hung a huge poster of Hersh Goldberg-Polin in a floral printed shirt. Having grown up near my office, in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem, in an American family like mine, he felt just one degree away from me. Many people I know knew him. Along with thousands of others, I walked with a flag to meet his funeral procession.