To Be a Jewish Mom During These Times

Every time I look at one of my kids, I see Ariel Bibas

The last sixteen months, I’ve been knee-deep in the war in Israel. Since literally October 9th, I’ve been working in media to help keep the hostage crisis in the news. That’s taken a lot of forms: helping to book hostage families (and eventually, thank G-d, returned hostages) on media, being a communications consultant for families both in media and politically, accompanying families around Washington D.C. with Members of Congress and dignitaries, ghost-writing op-eds and speeches, placing news stories about hostages, etc. I eventually co-founded my own communications firm because of all of this work, though everything hostage is pro-bono.

As a result, I’ve become close to a number of the families. Some of them have had happy endings, some of them not. It’s been a real roller-coaster emotionally. I joke, but it’s not really a joke, that all of the trauma I experienced in the first half of my life (my mother’s illness and eventual death when I was sixteen, my father’s suicide just a few years later) was training for this work.

Standing on my front lawn listening to a rabbi I’ve become close with tell me how his niece was (trigger warning here) murdered in front of her toddler and baby, cut open and her body booby trapped, stuffed with explosives. Her children were taken and used to lure others in the kibbutz out of their safe rooms, and then taken into Gaza but left on the border in the desert because they cried too much from the shrapnel and trauma… Eventually a neighbor saw them, ran into the desert and grabbed them, and kept them safe with her until the attack was over (another twelve hours)… I helped their story get onto Jake Tapper’s show; he sat down with her parents and now the world knows about what was done to this family.

It’s been an honor to do this work, to tell these stories and to keep them in the news. But I’m not going to lie and say it’s been easy.

I’ve not worked closely with the Bibas family; I helped an uncle of Shiri’s get on Fox News many months back, placed a cousin of theirs somewhere also, and have helped with general messaging about the family among those working in this space. I got a call earlier this week to ask for emergency fundraising help because Shiri’s uncle and aunt had to get on a plane, and the consulate would only pay for one ticket. There wasn’t time to argue, and we needed to throw a credit card on the counter to get it done. Thanks to the power of social media, I raised enough for the ticket in literally minutes (though we didn’t know for hours how much the ticket would cost, or if more family members would be coming). I sent the rest of what I raised to her family, and left a bit aside for a recently returned hostage that my business partner has done work with.

Since the earliest days of the war, they were the first family who stayed with me. The mother of four redheads, I couldn’t get their images out of my mind. My youngest son is just two weeks older than Kfir. Every night for months after the war started, as I rocked him to sleep and put him in his crib, I would wonder where Kfir was sleeping.

It didn’t occur to me for months that he might already be dead. How could they kill a baby? How could I be so naive to question that, given everything I already knew?

My fifth is not much younger than Ariel was when they were taken. They look strikingly similar. Every image across my social media of him sends me reeling. My mind can’t get out of the dark place, wondering what they did to those boys and their mother the month that they had them, if they had diapers and formula, how scared they must have been.

The only way I’ve stayed sane during these last sixteen months is trying as hard as I can to dissociate. I'm pretty good at that trauma response, and I know that this loop is one you absolutely cannot fall into. And yet, I look at my sweet son, and I see Ariel. I look at Ariel’s photos, and I see my sweet son.

In my fifth, I see who Ariel was when he was taken. In my sixth, I see who Kfir could have been.

I keep getting asked how I’m talking to my kids about all of this. I don’t have answers. My oldest daughter is the only one truly emotionally invested; she’s eleven. And she knows too much. They’ve all heard too much. In the beginning of the war, I was changing a diaper and put my phone down and a WhatsApp voice memo from a medical examiner started playing. My 4-year-old heard too much of it before I was able to turn it off. I’m not the expert to ask, "How do you talk to your kids about what’s going on in Israel?”

Eventually, I won’t see photos of Kfir and Ariel every time I open my phone. The world will move on, and I won’t be triggered every time I log on. My fifth will grow up; he won’t look like Ariel forever. Ariel will forever be four-years-old, my son, G-d willing, will not.

The last sixteen months has changed me in a deep way. We’ve seen the true face of evil, and I can never unsee it.