‘My Dad’s in the Sky’: Hostage Families Share Heartbreaking Parenting Moments

Jerusalem, 11 August, 2024 (TPS) -- The wives of captive and murdered Israelis shared anguished testimony with lawmakers about raising children without their husbands on Sunday as a Knesset committee sought ways to ease their plight.

The Knesset’s Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women met with representatives of 28 families with children to hear about their situation. While health officials were also present to discuss available resources, the mothers’ stories were emotionally charged. One Israeli women’s rights movement told The Press Service of Israel that the families have been receiving inadequate government support since October 7.

Racheli Baruch, of Giv’on, played a recording of her five-year-old son Ofek offering his support. His father, Uriel, was abducted by Hamas from the Nova Music Festival on October 7.

“Mom, with God’s help, I was not kidnapped, and I am here for you. We are all here to help you. If you need anything, just call me and I will help you,” said the small voice of Ofek from his mother’s phone filling the hushed committee room. “Sometimes I can do things for you if you don’t have the strength. I will do everything, easily. You can do anything as well, I am proud of you.”

Said Racheli, “It hurts me that he says something like this, that at his age he takes on a role that belongs to a husband, a fatherly role. I want him to be a child, to go to the playground. He’s like an adult, wanting to be by my side,” Racheli told the committee, stressing that Ofek is her youngest child.

The Tikva Forum for Families of Hostages announced in March it was informed by the Israel Defense Forces that the 35-year-old was killed in captivity and his body is still being held in Gaza.

Racheli said she only manages to maintain some sort of routine for the family thanks to her mother, but as she admits herself, there are things she doesn’t have the energy to do, “no mental availability or capacity.”

When Elkana Bohbot, one of the organizers of the Nova Festival was kidnapped, his wife Rivka consulted with three psychologists to figure out how to explain the situation to their three-year-old son.

“He waits for him to pick him up from the kindergarten, calling out, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ We told him, with the help of puppets in play, that Daddy went to work, but bad people came and put him behind a fence, not letting him come out,” Rivka told the committee.

“One day, by chance, my son watched ‘The Lion King’ cartoon. The next day, he goes out to the balcony at kindergarten and talks to his father in the sky, like Simba. ‘My dad won’t come back; he’s already in the sky,’ he told the teacher. The child waits for his father to come back every day,” she said.

“I came from Colombia, where kidnappings are a constant issue, and experiencing this event here is extremely difficult and unimaginable. I don’t have my family here, but my father and mother-in-law. Elkana’s mother was unable to get out of bed in the first few months to help me out, so you can imagine how difficult it was to keep the routine for the child,” she said.

Another mother told lawmakers she has been shielding her children from news about the hostage negotiations because talks focus on first resolving the fate of women and children captives, and that raises too much uncertainty for her kids.

“Where are the young fathers in the deal? Will my husband have to wait his turn in the negotiations? Is my child supposed to wait for the next deal? All those husbands are referred to as ‘young men’ in the negotiations. But they’re not just young men — they’re fathers of small children, they need to be back home,” said Avital Dekel-Chen, whose husband, Sagui, was abducted on October 7 while trying to protect Kibbutz Nir Oz.

“It can’t be that there’s another deal where my child doesn’t get her father back home. I don’t know how I will handle that,” she said tearfully.

Avital gave birth to the youngest of her three daughters in January.

Committee chair, MK Pnina Tamano-Shata demanded that the institutions do their best to help these mothers not only mentally but with their day-to-day lives.

“No amount of psychological treatment will help if they collapse physically,” Tamano-Shata insisted. “Today, they came with incredible strength, supporting each other, but some couldn’t make it here because they are suffering from mental breakdowns,” whether it be through allocating dedicated nurses or providing lawyers to help the families navigate bureaucracy.

In response to the hearing, the Israeli women’s rights movement, Naamat, told TPS-IL, “The families of the hostages do not receive enough assistance and support, including financial. Neither family members in the first circle nor family members in the second circle, who had to leave everything in order to support the family members and are completely transparent to the system. The government should have established an aid fund months ago for the benefit of the families. It’s been 10 months that they don’t get an answer.”

At least 1,200 people were killed, and 252 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on October 7. Of the 111 remaining hostages, 39 have been declared dead. Hamas has also been holding captive two Israeli civilians since 2014 and 2015, and the bodies of two soldiers killed in 2014.