Hamas’s Hostages Are the Face of a Continued Exile

By Sahar Tartak

Friday, August 08, 2025

 

Last weekend, Hamas released a video of Evyatar David, an emaciated hostage digging his grave in a dark tunnel. He’s 24. He looks like a ghost. Dark circles paint the skin around his eyes, and his bones protrude from his fragile body. It’s hard to look away.

 

I’m reminded of my great-grandmother, Leah, and her children, Adam and Tziporah, hungry in a ghetto. They also dug their own graves, at the hands of the Nazis in Poland.

 

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year during my university spring break, and I found Leah, Adam, and Tziporah in the concentration camp’s alphabetized “book of names.” The thick book records millions of victims of the Holocaust.

 

The October 7 massacre has been similarly memorialized. Lists of victims abound online, pop-up exhibitions of the Nova music festival came to the U.S., and visitors to Israel can see the real sites of the horrors, bullet holes and blood splattered on the walls of kibbutz homes.

 

Yet the brutalities cannot be truly memorialized, for they are not truly over. Evyatar reminds us of that. As does Rom Braslavski, seen in a hostage video released the day before by another terror group in Gaza. They are the faces of a continued exile.

 

I wince at the timing of the release of the videos. This past weekend also marked Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Tisha B’Av is the Jewish people’s dedicated day of mourning. On that date, the First (586 b.c.e.) and Second Temples (69 c.e.) in Jerusalem were destroyed, beginning our exile from the “Holy House.” On Tisha B’Av, the first Crusade was declared by Pope Urban II (1095), and within a month thousands of Jews were massacred. It was also the day Jews were violently banished from England (1290) and Spain (1492), and the day the first trainload of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto arrived at the Treblinka concentration camp and were sent to the gas chambers (1942).

 

Tisha B’Av began on Saturday night, and some mourning practices continued into Monday. Jews are prohibited from eating, drinking, bathing, and even greeting each other with a customary “hello.” We don’t sit on chairs of a standard height, either, so at prayer services we sat on the floor.

 

I attend a Manhattan synagogue whose congregants are mostly in their twenties. None of us were expecting to be the primary targets of the exile’s most recent wave of hate. Yet Hamas hit the Jewish people hardest at a music festival and, indirectly, on college campuses, with help from eager surrogates who espouse their hateful ideology. These are places of youth. Evyatar was taken hostage at 22.

 

During the service, we read the Book of Lamentations, whose Hebrew title, “Eicha,” is better translated as “How?” “How,” the prophet Jeremiah asks, is Jerusalem “sitting in solitude? The city that was filled with people has become like a widow.” She weeps and starves, she is filthy. Her enemies prevail against her. The Lord does not protect her.

 

I think about Evyatar, living in a tunnel on the verge of a slow and lonely death. The scripture is sadly prophetic. Leah, Adam, and Tziporah were no different. They, too, once led rich lives. Then a firing squad forced them beneath the ground.

 

Eicha? I wonder. How?

 

In the sea of pain, a young rabbi at the synagogue teaches why we observe Tisha B’Av, and his words explain Jeremiah’s. The day’s sadness, expressed in mourning practices that leave us disheveled and dejected, reminds us that the world we live in isn’t the world God wants for us. No, this one is broken.

 

We continue reading the prophecy in synagogue and reach a turning point. “It is good for a man that he bears a yoke in his youth. . . . Let him put his mouth into the dust; there may yet be hope. . . . For the Lord will not cast him off forever.”

 

Eicha’s ultimate lesson is one of hope: We won’t be cast off forever. We will spit out the dust from our mouths, and the yoke of our youth will become but a memory. This is the future we work toward. The pain reminds us of our mission to perfect the world, to banish the darkness in our midst with light. We can’t live our lives in despair, so we designate one day for our sadness and confusion, and force ourselves to rise up again tomorrow.

 

I look around my synagogue, a miniature Holy Temple, at youths bearing the yoke of the Jewish people together on the ninth day of Av. Their eyes gaze humbly toward the ground, and their hearts face up toward the heavens. They pray softly, sitting side by side on the floor, leaning against the walls, swaying back and forth. I think about how they will dedicate their lives to our sisters and brothers — like Evyatar — and to our ancestors — like Leah, Adam, and Tziporah — with a resilience that is supposedly rare in our generation. I look around, and I feel hope. It’s a tragic day, and there are no words. But I cannot help but smile.