{"id":184764,"date":"2025-12-14T21:11:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T21:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/184764\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T21:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T21:11:12","slug":"i-saw-our-dead-son-suddenly-alive-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/184764\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I Saw Our Dead Son Suddenly Alive Again\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is nothing new under the sun.\u201d So writes Rachel Goldberg-Polin in an essay for The Free Press today.<\/p>\n

Rachel\u2019s son Hersh was murdered in captivity in Gaza last year. In this piece to mark the start of Hanukkah, Rachel writes about newly public footage<\/a> of her son and his fellow captives lighting a menorah in the tunnels where they were held\u2014and murdered\u2014by Hamas. Even in hell on earth, they kept a more-than-2,000-year-old tradition alive. They used paper cups\u2014all they had\u2014to celebrate a holiday which memorializes the Jewish People\u2019s triumph over Antiochus, who during his reign in 168 BCE persecuted Jews and tried to impose pagan worship on the Temple in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

As Rachel puts it, they were sending a message to their captors, and now the rest of the world: \u201cWe are Jews and this is what we do on this holiday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel\u2019s essay was already written and edited when, this morning, we awoke to the appalling news out of Sydney. In a terror attack targeting Australian Jews, two gunmen killed at least 11 people and injured many more at an event to celebrate the start of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. (For more on this, read Brendan O\u2019Neill\u2019s \u201cThe Hunting of Jews at Bondi Beach<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

There is nothing new under the sun.<\/p>\n

\u2014The Editors<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In July this year, my husband and I were contacted by the person from the Israeli intelligence services whose job it is to tell us bad news. That is his actual job. Each of the hostage families has such a person. It is an unfortunate role to be in charge of kicking people when they are still down from the last time they were kicked down. He has a nice face and seems like a decent person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere is nothing new under the sun.\u201d So writes Rachel Goldberg-Polin in an essay for The Free Press…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-184764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}