PHOTO: Demonstrators march for the release of hostages in Tel Aviv Saturday, Jan. 18. “At every protest, they shared the names of every hostage, and that was the forefront of what happened,” Danit Rothstein explained. (Danit Rothstein/Special to The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
For Danit and Nora Rothstein, it was time to go home. 
“I think I’ve been drawn to go since Oct. 7 because of everything going on and feeling like we can’t do anything from here,” Danit explained. 
She, her parents, Nora and Fred Rothstein, and her siblings, had lived in Israel for four years when she was in high school, and they retain an indelible connection to the country. 
“It’s like a second home,” Nora said. “We go there and we just kind of fit into home there.”
So, when a planned volunteering trip through Congregation Neveh Shalom didn’t work out for logistical reasons, the pair resolved to go on their own. 
“I said to my mom, ‘why don’t we reach out to our cousin and see if we can use his apartment and just go on our own,’” Danit said. “There’s plenty of volunteer opportunities out there, and we’ll just make it work on our own.”
Thus, instead of a guided tour, mother and daughter dove back into the daily reality of the Jewish state for nearly three weeks in January. Based in Jerusalem, they traveled from Tel Aviv to the Gaza Envelope, volunteering, attending political protests and bearing witness to what Israel – and Israelis – continue to experience in the post- Oct. 7 reality.
“I think it was actually better doing it the way we did it than going on a program because we were actually able to do our own thing,” Danit said. “We were able to ride the buses and see what people are feeling day to day. We talked to people on the streets just randomly while we were there to just have conversation.”
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Much of the volunteer work in the country focuses on agriculture – thousands of foreign farm laborers fled the country after the Hamas terror attacks and have not returned, threatening Israel’s ability to feed itself and maintain its economy. The Rothsteins, through a Facebook group for volunteers coming to the country, found plenty of opportunities to help.
Their first week in the country they started each day taking two public buses to Givat Shaul, a Modern Orthodox neighborhood outside central Jerusalem, where they sorted avocados and other produce for food boxes that were going to the families of those who had been serving extended reserve duty with the Israel Defense Forces. 
“These fathers, usually the fathers, are away from their families for over a year now,” Nora said. “These are older men, 40- and 50-year-olds, who have been away from their families.”
The next week, they went to a different neighborhood where they assembled more food boxes for families in need. Here, Nora said she was something of a trendsetter in terms of transporting the loaded bag of produce. Once the bags were filled, they carried together to a staging area, usually six or seven at a time – a heavy load. Looking for a better way, Nora spied a cart. 
“I took my shopping cart and put individual bags in there,” she said. “I got six done at once, where everybody else was running around with one heavy bag.”
The next week, they went farther afield. Using the ride-sharing service Gett, an Israeli version of Uber, the Rothsteins left Jerusalem at 5:30 am each day for a moshav, a cooperative agricultural community that is less communal than a kibbutz, in the Gaza Envelope. 
“We learned how to prune grapevines to help the farmer who had lost all his foreign workers prepare the plants for next year,” Nora said. “He would have lost all his harvest, because these foreign workers, who also suffered a great deal on Oct. 7, as you know, were afraid to come back.”
Agricultural workers, primarily from Thailand, constituted the majority of the 71 foreign nationals killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and 31 Thai farm workers were taken hostage in Gaza following the attacks. In the aftermath of the attacks, more than 7,000 Thai nationals fled Israel, many on evacuation flights provided by the Thai government. 
It wasn’t the only way that the aftermath of the attacks was still prominent. 
“Every so often, we would hear explosions from Gaza,” Nora said, noting that the IDF was still actively fighting Hamas. “It became part of the background.”
They chatted with the farmer, over coffee and cookies, about politics in the United States in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. There wasn’t much small talk at their other work sites, but Nora remembers a particular conversation with a woman on a bus one Friday afternoon. The bus was delayed due to road closures in a haredi, sometimes referred to as “Ultra-Orthodox,” neighborhood, and Nora took a seat next to an Orthodox woman as they waited for traffic to get moving. They chatted in Nora’s somewhat rusty Hebrew, as the other woman spoke no English, about their families – a process made easier with pictures. 
“I have a picture of Danit, and she goes, ‘Oh, is that your son?’ I said, ‘No, this is my daughter and her wife,’” Nora recalled. “She was blown away by that, and there’s this man sitting behind Danit, and he’s listening to all this, and his eyes just pop open.” 
The woman was gracious and polite throughout and gave them directions to their next bus as they left, but Nora and Danit both knew they had been part of a moment of culture shock. 
“We were just laughing all the way home because I don’t think anybody would have ever had a conversation like that with this religious person,” Nora said.
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Many of their experiences were less entertaining but more profound. 
“We ended up immersing ourselves in the protests and the rallies that were happening around town,” Danit said. “At every protest, they shared the names of every hostage, and that was the forefront of what happened.”
The hostages are the focal point of seemingly every facet of society, even before the Rothsteins had gotten off their El-Al flight.
“The pilot came on and welcomed us to Israel, and ended with, ‘and we pray for the safe return of all the hostages,’” Nora said.  “That was both landing in Israel and landing in Los Angeles.”
“You fly into Tel Aviv, and the first thing you’re greeted by is pictures of hostages,” Nora continued. “Everywhere you go, there are pictures of these hostages. Everyone knows the hostages’ names here. Everyone knows every hostage. People lead their lives, and you see people smiling and laughing, but right underneath that surface, there’s sadness.”
They visited Hostages Square outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which has become a focal point for demonstrations. The square still includes the long, empty Shabbat table, with a place setting for each hostage, that was installed shortly after the attacks, as well as a 25-meter-long representation of one of Hamas’ tunnels under Gaza, complete with sound effects of gunfire and explosions, based on the accounts of one of the hostages held there. A virtual reality simulation of the environment in the tunnels was also available. 
“The VR was so real; the Hamas terrorist was like staring you in the eyes. You could hear the sounds of what’s happening next door, of the women getting sexually assaulted. You could hear the shootings and the explosions happening outside the room. You can see the captives who are totally bloodied, and one of them is holding a baby and [a terrorist is] yelling at her to be quiet and shut the baby up and all that,” Danit said. “That was really challenging for both of us. I think we were pretty shaken up after that.”
They also toured the sites of the attacks in the south–the police station in Sderot, the Nova Music Festival site, and The Car Wall in Tkuma, which displayed the cars destroyed by Hamas during the attacks, mostly in the course of murdering their occupants. Danit remembered the blue Seat Ibiza coupe belonging to Ori Danino, z”l, who fled the Nova site as the attacks unfolded. 
“He was basically out of harm’s way and safe, but he had met two or three other people at the festival that he became friends with,” she explained, “and he was like, ‘I need to go back and get them.’”
Everyone in the car was kidnapped and taken to Gaza. Two of them were released in November of 2024. Danino was murdered by Hamas on Aug. 29, 2024 – executed along with five other hostages. His body was recovered during an IDF raid in Gaza. 
Some were luckier but live with the consequences of that luck. Nora recalled that their tour guide at the Nova site had been at the festival. A group of three friends were scheduled to come to the event on the morning of Oct. 7 – when the rockets started falling, he called and warned them away. They were already in their bomb shelters, they reported there were terrorists in their neighborhood. Two days later, he learned that all three had been killed. 
“He was able to get out of the festival, but was almost killed at another place,” Nora said. “He’s going through PTSD. He’s doing this as part of his therapy, and it’s really difficult. It was very hard. He showed us his path of escape. I don’t know how he does it.”
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There are also those who help - and continue to help.
Shuva Junction, a road crossing near a moshav of the same name in the Gaza Envelope, became a critical crossroads early in the post-Oct. 7 military campaign. An IDF field hospital was set up nearby, and other military units staged there. Because all the military facilities were concentrated around the junction, IDF personnel could freely move there unlike other base areas where soldiers need permission from their officers to go off-base. 
“This junction became kind of a hub, because the area essentially became a large army base where they didn’t have to get permission to go to that section,” Danit said.
Volunteers, known as the Shuva Brothers, set up a small restaurant and began providing meals. The services available have grown from there to form something of an oasis for troops coming back from Gaza to be taken care of.
“Soldiers, when they get off duty in Gaza, they don’t have to ask permission to go there,” Nora explained. “They can grab a meal. They can rest. They have musicians playing. They have massage therapists there. They have a little store in the back where they can get supplies if they need. They have a library. It’s all run by volunteers.”
The Shuva Brothers aren’t related – they’re locals who saw a need and ensured it was met. Their operations are supported entirely by donations and volunteer labor – which can be challenging to find, as besides the significant IDF presence, Shuva is a decidedly rural area. Nevertheless, they are there.  
“They never close. They’re open,” Nora continued. “If they’re needed at two in the morning, they’re there.”
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With the pending change in administrations in the United States, American politics was a not infrequent topic of conversation. 
“The hard part is, like, we’re very anti-Trump, and a good portion of [Israelis] like [President Donald] Trump, because they don’t believe that Biden got the deal done and there’s so much gratitude right now for Trump for pushing this through,” Danit explained. “The average Israeli isn’t  aware of the antisemitism.”
Many, if not most gift shops in Jerusalem had Trump merchandise for sale. Outside of one such shop, Danit ended up in a surprising conversation. 
“He was talking to some guy, but he said it kind of loudly, ‘Who’s going to come first, Trump or the Moshiach, the Messiah?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Probably Trump,’” Danit recalled.  He said, ‘Excellent. We can’t wait for that.’”
She and her mother were handed hats at an anti-war demonstration – red with white lettering on the front that read, in English, “End the F------ War.” [The obscenity was partially censored, but not to the same extent.] 
“On the bill of the hat is a QR code, and it leads to a pro-Trump page that says, ‘Make Israel Normal Again’” Danit explained. 
“I brought it home, but I have not put it on since,” Nora said.
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Throughout their time in the country, there were protests every Saturday night after the conclusion of Shabbat. The focus was on the safe return of the hostages – to the extent that those advocating for a ceasefire and those who were not could march together in pursuit of the same goal.
“The contrast between America and Israel in what we saw is that even though there were opposing views on how to get to the end of the war, they were still able to march together and come together for the release of the hostages, which was in some ways beautiful,” Danit said, “because here [in the United States], the opposing side doesn’t think about the hostages, or they don’t talk about them, so the perception is that they don’t give a crap about them.”
Even the Rothsteins’ conversations with demonstrators were inclusive of multiple viewpoints. 
“They were trying to explain the different viewpoints,” Nora recalled. “They weren’t really giving us their opinions. They were just explaining all the different viewpoints and open to talking about it; ‘this is what this sign says, and this is what they’re saying, and this is what they’re chanting.’”
Some demonstrators did very little talking, notably the Mothers in White. 
“We were walking and there’s these people, mostly women, all dressed in white, sitting in a circle, very quietly, not saying anything.” 
Sometimes, one of the mothers will speak, but there’s no chanting or any of the other hallmarks of a typical protest. Their gatherings end with a singing of the Hebrew song “Bo’I Ima” – “Come, Mother.”
“It began as a song for children yearning for their mothers, and now it has transformed as their mothers yearning for their children,” Nora said. “This has become the song for these mothers waiting for their children to return, either from war or from being held hostage.”
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In the closing days of the Rothsteins’ visit, three families had that wish come true. 
On Jan. 19, Hamas turned over hostages Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher  to the Red Cross for return to Israel.
“There was still apprehension, because [Hamas] were supposed to send the list 24 hours in advance,” Danit said of the morning of Jan. 19.
“Nobody believed it was really going to happen,” Nora said. “Nobody trusts Hamas.”
The Rothsteins had been in Tel Aviv for dinner when the news broke; they returned to Hostages Square to take in the scene. Nora contrasted what she saw with the television feed from Gaza. 
“You saw them in Gaza. They were celebrating, singing and dancing,” she said.  “On the other screen, you saw Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. People were very quiet. People were apprehensive. People were anxious.”
Even in the anxiety, the tension, the uncertainty, there was – and is – hope. 
Danit recalled seeing a social media post from Damari, “who just went back to her apartment for the first time, and it’s demolished, she still gives messages of hope. The people that who are in captivity, they’re the ones that are coming out of captivity and sending messages of hope.”
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Nora recounted another feeling from her time in Israel – safety. 
Even in a country where playgrounds are designed with bomb shelters, like one in Sderot. Even when the Chabad house in Sderot can collect enough rocket debris to build a large menorah outside their facility. Even when she and Danit had to hustle to a bomb shelter multiple times during their visit, or when they watched Iron Dome missiles intercept terrorist rockets in the skies over Jerusalem at 4:30 in the morning. 
Nora’s mom was smuggled out of Italy via Switzerland during World War II, and her family faced antisemitism as far back as she remembers. Not in Israel.
“The one thing in Israel, you’re with people like you,” she said. “And I wasn’t afraid.”