There are people who have an on-off smile, contort their lips into a semblance of good humor, only to summarily flip the switch and return to normal morose service. Others show their teeth in the best and most genial way. And there are those who smile with their whole face, particularly with their eyes. Sigi Cohen is one of the latter.
Considering what she and her family have been going through these past two to three weeks, that is nothing short of remarkable.
On October 7, her 26-year-old son, Elya, was at the fateful festive Supernova gathering near Kibbutz Re’im together with his girlfriend, Ziv. Without going into too much of the gory nitty gritty – there has been plenty of that sort of coverage in the media – Ziv miraculously survived, while Elya was wounded and abducted by Hamas terrorists to Gaza.
A mother loses her son to Hamas at the Supernova music festival
I meet Sigi and, briefly, her husband, Momo, at their home in Tzur Hadassah. We sit outside in the gentle autumnal early Friday afternoon sun while their daughter serves us refreshments. I didn’t know what to expect or how to talk to a mother about her son being held captive by Palestinian terrorists. I went along primarily to listen and, at the very least, convey a degree of empathy.
AS THE father of two adult daughters, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for the Cohens. To tell the honest selfish truth, I don’t really want to try. But Sigi radiates goodness and optimism.
“I am certain Elya will come home to us, safe and sound,” she states. I told her I’d thought of Elya on my previous day’s bike ride, and even conducted a conversation with him in my head as I pedaled along the country roads. I said I also believed he would return to his family.
“I’ll invite you to his thanksgiving party,” Sigi responds, with a bright smile.
By the time I get to her, the Cohens have given interviews to several media outlets, both domestic and foreign.
“We are appearing in an article in Time magazine,” Sigi tells me. “They are putting out an edition about all the hostages. And I sat with someone from The New York Times.”
“There is stuff getting out there,” Momo interjects in passing. “There was something on Galgalatz [radio station] and on TV.” The idea seems to be to get the word out there to foreign pastures.
“We met with Yossi Cohen, the former head of the Mossad. He told us everyone in Israel supports us and that we need to get the message out across the world,” Sigi adds.
GETTING THE message out is being facilitated by the likes of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Ari Folman, who has overseen videoed interviews with dozens of relatives and friends of the hostages and uploaded them on the dedicated Bring Them Home Now website (stories.bringthemhomenow.net).
Some of the hostages’ loved ones have been encamped on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street for the past two weeks, talking to foreign and local press and passersby about their plight.
A few days ago, my wife and I met a senior citizen there named Oded, who hails from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak near the Gaza Strip. We waited while he finished an interview with a Greek female television reporter as he wore a sign hanging from his neck, in English, that read “Prisoner Deal Now.”
Oded is a soft-spoken man and shows little emotion as he relates – probably for the umpteenth time – the horrendous events that unfolded on his kibbutz early on October 7. He speaks about how he and his wife were holed up in their bedroom, which has a security door and reinforced windows, while the terrorists murdered and kidnapped his neighbors and friends.
“I tried to get hold of the head of security of the kibbutz, to find out what was going on,” he says. “I only discovered later that he was already dead.”
There is an air of sadness, bordering on resignation, about Oded.
“We felt abandoned by the army and the state. We woke up to the attack at 6:30 a.m., and no one came to the kibbutz [from the IDF] until 2:30 p.m. That’s inconceivable,” he remarks.
He is also nonplussed by the subsequent handling of the situation in and around his home patch.
“We have cows that need to be milked, so they sent a bunch of inexperienced volunteers and taught them how to milk the cows – via Zoom. That’s crazy. If the volunteers can go to my kibbutz, why can’t I?” Good question.
Oded, who over the years has ferried numerous Palestinians in need of medical treatment from the border to Israeli hospitals, is also bewildered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the hostage situation.
“If it were up to me, we would have already done a deal to swap our hostages with Palestinian prisoners held in Israel,” he declares. “But it is the politicians who make those decisions.”
SIGI COHEN is keenly aware of the hierarchical maze that stands between her and the possibility of a life-saving deal with Hamas.
“I would have already done the swap,” she says. “I don’t know what the politicians are planning.”
Meanwhile, her husband takes a sober look at the logistical side of the predicament.
“It’s not like with Gilad Schalit,” he says, referencing the IDF soldier released by Hamas in 2011, after five years in captivity in Gaza, in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
“And you can’t organize a military operation like [the 1976 raid to rescue Israeli hostages in] Entebbe [Uganda],” he notes. “The hostages in Gaza are scattered all over the place.”
The last morsel of information that the Cohens received about Elya is a photo of him that Hamas put out on Telegram.
“I don’t know exactly where he is or who is holding him,” says Sigi. “No one told us. No one from the army told us, either.”
I tiptoe my way through our conversation and eventually summon up the courage to ask the Cohens how they are surviving the ordeal of waiting while their only son – Elya has three younger sisters – is held captive in Gaza.
“Only through faith, the belief that Elya will come home,” Sigi declares. “I don’t see any other possibility.”
Sigi says she keeps her emotional and mental channels of communication open.
“I talk to him a lot, in my head. It is hard for me to imagine him, so I look at pictures of him. But I feel he is okay. And it is important that he should feel we are okay too. I know he cares for us a lot – for his father, and for me, and the rest of us. Ziv told me she thinks Elya thinks she’s not alive, and I tell her to transmit messages to him that she is okay.
“Elya doesn’t know what happened to her. She was only rescued six hours later, along with two or three others by a civilian– I don’t know how they all survived.”
It took another 48 hours for an IDF representative to get to Tzur Hadassah to inform the Cohens that their son had been kidnapped.
“They told us they would help us in any way they can. There are a couple of officers who come here every few days to see how we are and ask us if we need anything. And there is a civilian volunteer who helps us with all sorts of logistical things – financial, banking stuff, and that sort of thing – anything we can’t manage right now.”
Faith is a powerful tool, particularly in times of crisis.
“I believe that at the end of the day, everyone wants peace and quiet and to be able to get on with their lives,” says Sigi.
“I am certain the Gazans don’t want their houses to be destroyed. They just want to live.”
That is a wonderfully empathetic view of a situation in which her son is being held captive by terrorists.
“What interests me more than anything is that Elya, and everyone else, comes home safe and sound. My parents just came here from Jerusalem, with food for Shabbat. We are all anxious, and we all take care of each other.
That is not always easy. “There are times when I operate on automatic pilot, and I can’t do anything,” Sigi continues.
“There are good people who help us. We have to take as much responsibility as we can but, unfortunately, it is the politicians who do the talking,” she says.
“Let’s hope it works.”
The Jerusalem Post and OneFamily are working together to help support the victims of the Hamas massacre and the soldiers of Israel who have been drafted to ensure that it never happens again.