Rachel Goldberg-Polin was photographed in Jerusalem on Wednesday with her new book, When We See You Again, a memoir that arrives nearly two years after her son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was kidnapped from a music festival in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 cross-border attack on Israel and later killed in Gaza nearly a year after that abduction.
For many in Israel and beyond, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, became one of the most recognizable faces of the hostage crisis. Released hostages said he repeated a Viktor Frankl line in the Gaza tunnels: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” The words spread far beyond the tunnels, appearing on signs and graffiti across Israel and around the world next to his image, turning his name into a symbol of endurance and grief.
The weight of that symbolism was already clear last year, when friends and supporters gathered outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, after Hamas released a video of Goldberg-Polin and demanded an immediate deal for the release of all hostages. A few months later, Jonathan Polin and Rachel Goldberg attended their son’s funeral in Jerusalem on Monday, Sept. 2, 2024, closing a public vigil that had stretched from the first days after the kidnapping through the final confirmation of his death.
The new memoir points to where the story has landed now: not at the end of the hostage crisis, but at the place where public advocacy, private mourning and memory keep overlapping. Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s book joins that record, and hersh goldberg polin remains the face people still recognize when they think about the cost of the war and the hostages still at its center.
