PHOTO: In this image from a livestream recording,Congregation Neveh Shalom Cantor Eyal Bitton sings at Vigil for the Hostages Monday, Sept. 2 at the synagogue. Hundreds gathered in person and online to mourn the loss of six hostages murdered by Hamas the weekend prior. (Courtesy Congregation Neveh Shalom)
The Jewish Review staff
“In an ideal world, the only gatherings we’d have would be to celebrate blessings…. But today, we find ourselves in the midst of what feels like ongoing curses,” Rabbi Eve Posen said from the bimah of Congregation Neveh Shalom’s main sanctuary Monday, Sept. 2.
Her words alluded to the opening of Parsha Re’eh, read from Deutronomy just two days before: “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.” The curse that brought Posen to the bimah and more than 300 people to the synagogue, with another 250 watching via livestream, was the announcement of the murder of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov and Ori Danino by Hamas in Gaza that weekend. 
“For 332 days we’ve come together with hope in our hearts that the hostages would come home, and in recent weeks that hope was palpable,” Rabbi Posen said. “There’s no meaning that helps us out of our desperate discomfort with this awful reality.”
When the news came, just as Shabbat was ending in Portland, Rabbi Posen told The Jewish Review that she quickly connected with the rest of Neveh Shalom’s staff and others to ensure that this vigil was available to both the Neveh Shalom community and the broader Jewish community in Portland, as an opportunity to sit shiva for those who had been killed. 
“We’ve come together this evening to mourn. To rend our clothes as mourners. To fulfill our need to know that we are not alone. We need justice, a cessation to war, and the return of the remaining hostages,” she told the assembled audience. “We can cry our hot and angry tears. And then, with the strength of one another, we must pick ourselves up and begin again to do the impossible work of making our world a better place.”
Following her remarks, Rabbi David Kosak, Neveh Shalom’s Senior Rabbi, read from Psalm 130.
“There’s a capacity of the Book of Psalms to find for us the words that we struggle to find at a difficult moment,” he said. Fittingly, he read, in Hebrew and then English, from the Psalm, “Out of the depths I call you, oh Lord. Oh, Lord, listen to my cry, be attentive to my pleas for mercy. “
Efrat Avsker, spoke of her brother, Ohad, and 100 others who are still in captivity.
“This number is dwindling, and not because hostages are being freed alive,” she lamented. 
“It was overpowering in a sense of communal loss, but personal loss as well,” Rabbi Posen told The Jewish Review after the vigil. “So to have Efrat there to speak was a space of reminding us that there’s still hope; her brother, as far as she knows, is still alive.”
CNS Executive Director Marlene Edenzon and Jewish Federation of Greater Portland President and CEO Marc Blattner shared biographical details of each of the six victims before Cantor Bitton lead the recitation of El Malei Rachamim – “God full of mercy.”
CNS educators Mel Berwin and Etti Segal shared a poem, “Instinct,” by Israeli author Sarai Shavit, written from the perspective of a parent reassuring a child in the midst of ongoing terror – Segal in the original Hebrew, Berwin in English, before Rabbi Posen led the assembly in the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Cantor Bitton closed the service – as a show of solidarity and, perhaps, a nod to the hope that Rabbi Posen spoke of – with Israel’s national anthem, HaTikvah – “The Hope.”