If you’ve followed Unpacking Israeli History for a while, you know I’m drawn to patterns. Study history for long enough, and it’s hard not to see them: echoes, cycles, recurring themes. If you had asked me, before October 7th, to name a thread that runs through Jewish history, I don’t know, I might have said resilience, education, family. And they’re all right. But I would not have said captivity.
Our story as a people begins with captivity: with Israelites enslaved and beaten.
The Jewish people became a nation the moment we were led out of bondage. The exodus from Egypt, is the birth of the Jewish people, the foundation upon which all of our other stories are built. The Jewish people, we refer to this moment automatically, without thinking much: Once we were slaves. Now, we are free.
But the pattern did not end in Egypt. Centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel out of bondage, the Assyrian Empire paid the Jewish people a visit. They didn’t manage to destroy the southern kingdom of Judah, but they laid waste to the Israelite kingdom in the north.But the southern kingdom could not withstand the force of history, either. The Babylonians succeeded where the Assyrians had failed. They destroyed the first Temple and dragged our ancestors into exile, where the Biblical psalmist captured their pain: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion,” or in Hebrew, “ “Al naharot Bavel, sham yashavnu gam bachinu, bezokhreinu et Tzion.”
The children of Israel, once sovereign, now scattered, forced into exile, which is itself a kind of captivity.
Maybe you know how this exile ends.
A new king rises and allows the Jews to go home and rebuild. Some stay in Babylon. They have learned to love their exile. They have learned to adapt.
A minority returns home. Their mouths filled with laughter, their tongues with joy.
But history comes calling for these dreamers too. Six centuries after the Jews return home, they are booted out once more, this time by the Roman Empire.
Those stiff-necked upstarts who dared to rebel against mighty Rome were now chained to one another, paraded through the streets so everyone could see their shame. Rome had won. The Jews who had caused them such headaches were exiled or enslaved. They even built a monument to this moment of triumph that still stands today. The Arch of Titus shows Jewish prisoners hefting a menorah on their shoulders, heads bowed, spines bent. The posture not of a free man, but of a slave.
History kept finding ways to tug on this thread. Captivity and liberation took on new forms.
As the first Crusaders marched to the Holy Land in 1096, they laid waste to the Jewish communities of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms. On fire with holy conviction, they gave these Jews a choice. They could finally see the light and convert to Christianity, or they could die.
Many chose death. The ones not granted this mercy were taken prisoner, tortured, and sold as slaves. Jewish communities around the world raised money for their ransom. It is a great mitzvah, a mitzvah gedola, we are told, to redeem captives. One of the highest obligations of Jewish life.
The centuries that followed were no kinder. The High Inquisitor established a process for rooting out secret Jews. Any converso suspected of practicing Judaism was imprisoned, tortured, often killed.
The centuries change, but the themes repeat. During pogroms – in Europe, in North Africa, in the Holy Land itself – mob “justice” ruled. Most of the time, it was enough to beat or maim or rape or torture or kill. Sometimes, though, the mob held Jews for ransom, knowing that even the poorest communities would find a way to scrape together the kidnappers’ fees.
In the 20th century, captivity went industrial. The Nazis turned it into component parts, perfected the assembly line efficiency of stealing and murdering Jews. When the nightmare finally ended, some survivors wore captivity on their skin.
After the Holocaust, the world said “never again,” but for many Jews captivity never ended.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet Jews were forbidden to live freely as Jews or even to leave. When they tried to reconnect to their Judaism – to learn Hebrew, to circumcise their sons, to live in any way as Jews – they were harassed, surveilled, often imprisoned.
Natan Sharansky is perhaps the most famous of the thousands of these so-called prisoners of Zion. He endured nine years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including more than four hundred days in solitary confinement.
When he was finally freed in 1986, his Soviet captors ordered him to cross a bridge in Berlin in a crisp straight line. On the other side of the bridge was freedom. The possibility of a new life in the Jewish state. An endless horizon.
He just had to walk there in a nice straight line.
Instead, he zigzagged his way across, heading to freedom in his way.
It was his final moment of defiance, a reminder to the guards that they had never controlled him, and so they could never break him.
The Israeli anthem, Hatikva, sums up the Jewish people’s aspirations as follows: lihiyot am hofshi b’artzeinu, eretz Zion, Yerushalayim. To be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. But even in our land, we faced captivity. Not all of us, but enough to paralyze and shock and wound us all: the Israeli pilots shot down over enemy territory, the soldiers ambushed and dragged into hell. When I was a kid, in Baltimore, I wore dog tags with their names. Zachariah, Yehuda, Zvi, and Ron.
In 2006, we got three new names to add to the list. Eldad. Ehud. Gilad.
Only one of those stories had a happy ending, if you can call five years in a dank underground cell lined with explosives a happy end to the story. We didn’t realize 2006 was just a dress rehearsal. Because the next time around, in 2023, Hamas didn’t just take one or two. And they didn’t confine themselves to soldiers.
251 people. 251. Holocaust survivors. Grandparents. A baby, less than nine months old. A cross-section of Israeli society. Jews, Arabs, guest workers and students from Thailand and Nepal. Tourists. Visitors. People who had just wanted to dance.
Among the 251 people dragged into Gaza that day was a middle-aged dad named Eli Sharabi.
He didn’t know, when the terrorists dragged him away from his wife Lianne and his teenage daughters Noya and Yahel, that he would return to an empty house. Within minutes or hours of Eli’s abduction, Hamas murdered all three. He didn’t know he would be held for 491 days. Beaten, starved, humiliated, chained up in the dark. He didn’t know that his brother, Yossi, also taken captive, would be murdered in captivity. He didn’t know that after 491 days of torture and starvation and abuse, he would be released, his emaciated face shocking Israelis.
And he couldn’t have known then that he would become a symbol for Israelis and the Jewish people. A job he never asked for. A role no one wants. To be an inspiration, a source of faith. To be the face of resilience. An avatar of strength.
Jewish history is filled with these figures. Heroes who never wanted to be heroes. But we don’t get to choose the roles we’re pushed into. Only how we react. Only what we do with the circumstances that have been thrust upon us. And because we have always had that choice, the story of the Jewish people has never been solely about suffering, but about resilience, too. About the insistence on hope, the refusal to break, the belief that even in the darkest cell, the Jewish soul can remain free.
Captivity is a long thread in Jewish history. But so is liberation.
And no one illustrates this better than Eli Sharabi. His story is both ancient and immediate. Deeply personal and also national. It is his story, but it is also the Jewish people’s story.
The redemption of captives is not some abstract idea, a random holdover of the ancient past. It’s a directive for every generation. We are a family. We do not leave our family behind.
Our story doesn’t end in exile or in silence. Our story ends with liberation. And all of us – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, WHATEVER – all of us are commanded to fulfill this great mitzvah. This human duty.
It is our job to redeem the captive, in whatever way we can.
I’m Noam Weissman, and this is Unpacking Israeli History.
Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Carol and Adam Reich. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or just to say what’s up, be in touch at Noam@unpacked.media.
As always, check us out on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, all the places. Just search Unpacking Israeli History and hit the follow or subscribe button. Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
—
If you’ve followed Unpacking Israeli History for a while, you know I’m drawn to patterns. Study history for long enough, and it’s hard not to see them: echoes, cycles, recurring themes. If you had asked me, before October 7th, to name a thread that runs through Jewish history, I don’t know, I might have said resilience, education, family. And they’re all right. But I would not have said captivity.
Our story as a people begins with captivity: with Israelites enslaved and beaten.
The Jewish people became a nation the moment we were led out of bondage. The exodus from Egypt, is the birth of the Jewish people, the foundation upon which all of our other stories are built. The Jewish people, we refer to this moment automatically, without thinking much: Once we were slaves. Now, we are free.
But the pattern did not end in Egypt. Centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel out of bondage, the Assyrian Empire paid the Jewish people a visit. They didn’t manage to destroy the southern kingdom of Judah, but they laid waste to the Israelite kingdom in the north.But the southern kingdom could not withstand the force of history, either. The Babylonians succeeded where the Assyrians had failed. They destroyed the first Temple and dragged our ancestors into exile, where the Biblical psalmist captured their pain: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion,” or in Hebrew, “ “Al naharot Bavel, sham yashavnu gam bachinu, bezokhreinu et Tzion.”
The children of Israel, once sovereign, now scattered, forced into exile, which is itself a kind of captivity.
Maybe you know how this exile ends.
A new king rises and allows the Jews to go home and rebuild. Some stay in Babylon. They have learned to love their exile. They have learned to adapt.
A minority returns home. Their mouths filled with laughter, their tongues with joy.
But history comes calling for these dreamers too. Six centuries after the Jews return home, they are booted out once more, this time by the Roman Empire.
Those stiff-necked upstarts who dared to rebel against mighty Rome were now chained to one another, paraded through the streets so everyone could see their shame. Rome had won. The Jews who had caused them such headaches were exiled or enslaved. They even built a monument to this moment of triumph that still stands today. The Arch of Titus shows Jewish prisoners hefting a menorah on their shoulders, heads bowed, spines bent. The posture not of a free man, but of a slave.
History kept finding ways to tug on this thread. Captivity and liberation took on new forms.
As the first Crusaders marched to the Holy Land in 1096, they laid waste to the Jewish communities of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms. On fire with holy conviction, they gave these Jews a choice. They could finally see the light and convert to Christianity, or they could die.
Many chose death. The ones not granted this mercy were taken prisoner, tortured, and sold as slaves. Jewish communities around the world raised money for their ransom. It is a great mitzvah, a mitzvah gedola, we are told, to redeem captives. One of the highest obligations of Jewish life.
The centuries that followed were no kinder. The High Inquisitor established a process for rooting out secret Jews. Any converso suspected of practicing Judaism was imprisoned, tortured, often killed.
The centuries change, but the themes repeat. During pogroms – in Europe, in North Africa, in the Holy Land itself – mob “justice” ruled. Most of the time, it was enough to beat or maim or rape or torture or kill. Sometimes, though, the mob held Jews for ransom, knowing that even the poorest communities would find a way to scrape together the kidnappers’ fees.
In the 20th century, captivity went industrial. The Nazis turned it into component parts, perfected the assembly line efficiency of stealing and murdering Jews. When the nightmare finally ended, some survivors wore captivity on their skin.
After the Holocaust, the world said “never again,” but for many Jews captivity never ended.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet Jews were forbidden to live freely as Jews or even to leave. When they tried to reconnect to their Judaism – to learn Hebrew, to circumcise their sons, to live in any way as Jews – they were harassed, surveilled, often imprisoned.
Natan Sharansky is perhaps the most famous of the thousands of these so-called prisoners of Zion. He endured nine years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including more than four hundred days in solitary confinement.
When he was finally freed in 1986, his Soviet captors ordered him to cross a bridge in Berlin in a crisp straight line. On the other side of the bridge was freedom. The possibility of a new life in the Jewish state. An endless horizon.
He just had to walk there in a nice straight line.
Instead, he zigzagged his way across, heading to freedom in his way.
It was his final moment of defiance, a reminder to the guards that they had never controlled him, and so they could never break him.
The Israeli anthem, Hatikva, sums up the Jewish people’s aspirations as follows: lihiyot am hofshi b’artzeinu, eretz Zion, Yerushalayim. To be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. But even in our land, we faced captivity. Not all of us, but enough to paralyze and shock and wound us all: the Israeli pilots shot down over enemy territory, the soldiers ambushed and dragged into hell. When I was a kid, in Baltimore, I wore dog tags with their names. Zachariah, Yehuda, Zvi, and Ron.
In 2006, we got three new names to add to the list. Eldad. Ehud. Gilad.
Only one of those stories had a happy ending, if you can call five years in a dank underground cell lined with explosives a happy end to the story. We didn’t realize 2006 was just a dress rehearsal. Because the next time around, in 2023, Hamas didn’t just take one or two. And they didn’t confine themselves to soldiers.
251 people. 251. Holocaust survivors. Grandparents. A baby, less than nine months old. A cross-section of Israeli society. Jews, Arabs, guest workers and students from Thailand and Nepal. Tourists. Visitors. People who had just wanted to dance.
Among the 251 people dragged into Gaza that day was a middle-aged dad named Eli Sharabi.
He didn’t know, when the terrorists dragged him away from his wife Lianne and his teenage daughters Noya and Yahel, that he would return to an empty house. Within minutes or hours of Eli’s abduction, Hamas murdered all three. He didn’t know he would be held for 491 days. Beaten, starved, humiliated, chained up in the dark. He didn’t know that his brother, Yossi, also taken captive, would be murdered in captivity. He didn’t know that after 491 days of torture and starvation and abuse, he would be released, his emaciated face shocking Israelis.
And he couldn’t have known then that he would become a symbol for Israelis and the Jewish people. A job he never asked for. A role no one wants. To be an inspiration, a source of faith. To be the face of resilience. An avatar of strength.
Jewish history is filled with these figures. Heroes who never wanted to be heroes. But we don’t get to choose the roles we’re pushed into. Only how we react. Only what we do with the circumstances that have been thrust upon us. And because we have always had that choice, the story of the Jewish people has never been solely about suffering, but about resilience, too. About the insistence on hope, the refusal to break, the belief that even in the darkest cell, the Jewish soul can remain free.
Captivity is a long thread in Jewish history. But so is liberation.
And no one illustrates this better than Eli Sharabi. His story is both ancient and immediate. Deeply personal and also national. It is his story, but it is also the Jewish people’s story.
The redemption of captives is not some abstract idea, a random holdover of the ancient past. It’s a directive for every generation. We are a family. We do not leave our family behind.
Our story doesn’t end in exile or in silence. Our story ends with liberation. And all of us – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, WHATEVER – all of us are commanded to fulfill this great mitzvah. This human duty.
It is our job to redeem the captive, in whatever way we can.
I’m Noam Weissman, and this is Unpacking Israeli History.
—
Noam: Eli, thank you for being here.
Eli: Thank you for having me.
Noam: I actually want to start this interview by telling you something, Eli. Reading your book, your book which I have right here, Hostage, it made me cry. It made me cry a lot and I’m not a crier at all. But there was one point in your memoir where your captors mock you and try to persuade you to think that Israelis, Jews around the world, people around the world who are good people forgot about you. You mentioned this at some point.
And I want you to know that not for a second is that true. Not for a second was that true. Every single week in my community, my wife and their friends were davening, praying for you. Every single week, every single day, every single Shabbat. We had a chair with your name on it and others names on it. Other captives. We thought about you all the time. I’m in South Florida and this is true for me, this is true for millions of other people and that was a moment that I lost it reading your book because I couldn’t imagine what it could feel like for you to think that people like me and others, people that never met you, but that we forgot about you and I want you to know not for a second is that true.
Eli: Thank you very much. But it was a part of their psychological terror. We didn’t really, you know, try not to pay attention to that. We understood what they’re trying to do. And since my release, I started to understand what Am Israel and the Jewish communities around the world did for the hostages, and pray and fought in the streets, and all these protests and marches. And it was really warm my heart to see all this solidarity of the Jewish community with the Israeli people. And that’s what we really need to know, that we are not alone. And I’ve been in many, many Jewish communities since I was released in the world. And I was very grateful to them and thank them personally, each one of them. So thank you very much.
Noam: Thank you. And Eli, I want to start asking you a number of questions right now. You’ve become a symbol. Everyone knows your name. Everyone in the Jewish community knows your name, Eli Sharabi. But who are you to yourself? Are you a hostage? Are you a father, bereaved father, an av shakul? Are you an Israeli, a Jew, a patriot, a nationalist? Who are you? What is your identity?
Eli: Well, first of all, I’m a Jew and Israeli. And of course I’m a father and I will always be a father of Noya and Yahel and a husband for Lian. Nothing will change it. And I will be always a son to my mother and brother, to my brothers and sisters. And it’s not all gone, nothing of that. And nothing will change it. If I think anything, you know, that will change of my status, I’ll probably let them win. And I’m not, I’m not going to do that.
And I don’t think I have any privilege to stay in bed all day and cry. So I never considered myself as a victim. I’m a survivor. I’m waking up every day, choosing life. And I’m doing, you know, all my best that my brother, you know, see, and my wife Lian and my daughters Noya and Yahel will be proud of me.
Noam: They definitely, without a doubt, they definitely would. The last page of your book, and I’m not going to give it away, but that last page of your book is, I probably read it five or six times. I was thinking about it as a message for me, a message for all of us. But one of the things that I keep on thinking about when reading your book is wondering this question.
For 491 days, you were a hostage. You were in captivity. And I’m wondering if you ever turned to Jewish history for strength, if you ever turned to Natan Sharansky and thinking about him and what it was like to be in the Soviet Gulag or you thought about even the Holocaust when, in the book, you talk about making Kiddush on Friday night on water and not on grape juice. You talk about having small acts of rebellion like drinking the orange orange Fanta soda. And that made me laugh. I was cracking up at that point in the book. I was like, what a move, what a move, Eli. Did you turn to Jewish history for strength?
Eli: Of course, we all, all four of us have been together for 14 months together, 24, seven, 50 meters underground. We’ve talked about a lot of Holocaust survivors and of course, Nathan Sharansky and Gilad Shalit after that. And we’ve talked all about them and all of them.
When you’re there, you know you have no way to give up. You know that people outside, your family, your friends, fighting for you. There’s no way you give up and you take any source that can give you strength like faith, faith in God. And we are not religious, all four of us. And we prayed every morning. We waited, we waited for Friday evening to do this Kiddush, and I say Eshet Chayil to my mother, my sisters and my wife and to say Kiddush for water anyway, we didn’t have wine, to keep this quarter pita bread, just to do hamotzi lechem min haaretz. And all these blessings gave us lots of strength and remind us, our family right now, sitting around the table and be together and worried about us.
And it was very, very emotional moments for us and it was very important. And of course, surviving built for small victories, never one big heroic victory. And you understand that and you try to have small victories every day.
Noam: Yeah, you mentioned in the book that even though you don’t identify or did not identify somebody who is religious, there was a moment in time in which the captors tried to get you to embrace Islam. And they tried to get you to say, I believe in Islam, I’m a Muslim and I will pray in your way.
I kept on thinking, Eli, I don’t get it. If I’m there and I want a little bit more of something, I want to have something that, you talked about the pain of hunger throughout. And if you’re not a religious person, why did you not just say, okay, I’ll either make believe, I’ll embrace Islam, I’ll just do it. Like, why not? If you’re a secular person, not so religious, why not just embrace Islam at that moment?
Eli: I know it sounds crazy because we really, really were hungry and you never can understand how hungry you can be. And you eat every crumb from the carpet after you get this one meal a day. And you can eat the walls if they let you know, and it will be a food for you or something like that. And when we refuse their bribe, just for saying some sentences from the Quran and to say we are Muslims or something like that.
It’s much more, I wouldn’t say important, but it lifts your spirit up and sometimes this winnings of the spirit, it’s much more than the food. It’s amazing, it’s amazing this feeling that we are together and we refuse to eat their bribe food. And that was an amazing feeling for us.
Noam: Did you know that you would have the strength in these moments to say, I’m not going to embrace Islam or I’m going to follow my moral compass? Did you know that about yourself before you were taken hostage?
Eli: Never thought about it. I always knew that I’m a very strong person in my mind. I always had this center that, you know, I know what I am, and what can I do and what are my boundaries and my values that my parents you know raised me. And so I knew all these things, but you never know how you react in this extreme situation.
So because of that, I’m not judging anyone that does things in this situation. It’s not for me to judge these things. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m choosing to do. And it’s enough for me.
Noam: You know, every single time I say the Shema now, you mentioned that for 491 days you said the prayer, which is what I view as is the pledge of allegiance of the Jewish people. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Yachad, hero Israel, God is our God, God is one. And you said it every day when you were there, 491 days. And I know I’m supposed to be thinking about God when I say that, but I have you. I have you in my mind, because it’s something that you committed to doing. I don’t even know if you, would you say you committed to it or you just did it? Because it brought you something.
Eli: The first moment they pushed me in the car, the back of the car in the day of October 7, I said it automatically. It’s something that was deep, deep down with me. I’m not religious. I don’t live a religious life. I was raised in a traditional family that we used to do a Kiddush every Friday and go to the synagogue on holidays and Friday with my father, but I wasn’t religious.
And automatically in the car on October 7, it’s, you know, I’ve said that once and I didn’t stop since then. It gave me a lot of strength. I really, really believed all the way, 491 days that I have this hashgacha pratit. That’s something to protect me. I don’t know why I felt that. That was amazing for me. I could die, you know, at least 10, 20 times in this, during this captivity and something protected me and somebody wanted me alive, that’s what I believe. So, you know, my faith has got stronger after this captivity. I’m still not religious, but I really, really believe in this power of faith.
Noam: Yeah, Hashgachah Pratit, the Hebrew word that you used means divine providence, that something is watching over you.
Eli: Yes.
Noam: I want to switch from talking about you to talking about the experience with Hamas. In the book, and what I’ve heard you do throughout, is you humanize your captors in the book. You talk about how they speak to their children, speak to their families.
And I was moved by how human you viewed them, but you also made clear it was not from Stockholm Syndrome. It’s not that you started to identify with them or their cause in any sort of way. For many people around the globe, people like me, maybe, and others listening, they see Hamas captors not as human, maybe because we don’t know Hamas captors and what we hear from Hamas captors, they just sound awful. They sound like they’re doing something that is despicable, Nazi-like. So how did you do that? How do you humanize your captors?
Eli: It’s a good question, you know, I don’t know if I humanized them or not. They’re probably human beings, very twisted, very cruel. They’re terrorists. They are able to murder women, children, babies, old people, just like that, without really thinking about that. It didn’t really bother them at all. They’re very twisted human beings, that’s for sure.
And that’s what that’s the problem with the jihad, fundamentalistic jihad. They are brainwashed. And that’s awful. But again, I live with them 24/7 in the same place. And I know the relationship I’m having with them is going to help me to survive. And I’m going to do everything that helps me to survive because that’s what I promised to my daughters when they took me out of the house on October 7th. I told them I’d come back and I wanted to make this promise. I didn’t care if it would be with hands or no hands, with legs or no legs. I didn’t care. So for me to have a relationship with these people, it was very, very important to my survival. So that’s what I did.
Noam: That’s what you did. And you humanized them throughout the book, again, without identifying with them. There’s Hamas captors, but there’s something else. There’s also the question of Palestinians. Are there any innocent Palestinians from your perspective? You were not just with Hamas people, but at different times, regular people in bedrooms of little kids with mothers and fathers, people who could have been, I don’t know, different jobs, doctors, teachers, whatever they were. From what you’ve seen and from what you know, do you believe there are innocent Palestinians? And what does it mean to be innocent?
Eli: Okay. For my experience, what I experienced, the civilians in Gaza, the Gazans, and I met doctors and teachers and all of what you mentioned, and no one of them were so-called uninvolved, unfortunately. I don’t know if it’s all the Palestinians, all the Gazans. I don’t know. I mean, from my experience, the people I’ve met, it was time that Hamas terrorists was afraid from the civilians outside when we’ve been in this house of this family. And they were afraid they will notice that I’m not local in this house and they will come to lynch us. That’s what I can say. So unfortunately, I didn’t meet anyone that was there, you know, with your compassion or uninvolved. The old children for Hamas in the first top of October 7 in the mosque, there were a mob of civilians that tried to lynch me. So that’s the Gazans, the civilians, I experienced.
Noam: Do you think there’s any way for them to not behave that way? Do you think they’re almost controlled by Hamas? In the book, it felt like a lot of your captors, interestingly, you speak a lot in your book about the power of choice, which I want to get to in a little bit, but it sounded to me like your captors didn’t live a life of choice. They seem to be living a life of submission, submission to their higher authorities, submission to God, submission, their perception of God, I should say. Do you think that there’s a way for them to liberate themselves from this extreme ideology?
Eli: Well, I’m sure it will be extremely difficult for them to, you know, not to be controlled by Hamas or maybe other terror organizations, because you need a very, very strong leadership to take their place. And I can’t see there’s anyone that can do it. They control the money, they control the weapons in Gaza. So you can say that probably some Gazans are, you can count them as hostages for Hamas.
I can tell you they don’t care about their population. We’ve seen, you know, from this humanitarian aid that was for their population that would have food, they stole dozens of boxes every week, every two weeks, they brought it to the tunnels and they ate like kings five times a day. We went during that time, we ate one meal and I’m sure that some Gazans probably didn’t have food as well. So unfortunately, I can’t see, you know, can’t see them not controlled by Hamas. So this is the reality of Gaza.
Noam: What I found remarkable was the juxtaposition of the inability of your captors to live a life of choice and to think about how you, who were in captivity, chose nonstop to live a life of choice. You wrote at one point in your book, channel your strength toward the things that you can manage and stay yourself.
You spoke about what I call in Hebrew, Simchat HaYom, in Hebrew meaning something that was positive from the day. Every single Shabbat, Eli, every single Friday night with my family, what we do is this thing called Simchat HaShavua, something positive throughout the week. Everyone says one thing.
And you know what? Sometimes we don’t realize what we have and the kids start saying, I don’t know what happened this week, that was good.
And then I read your book. And you talked about in captivity, something positive from the day that you had. And I kept on thinking, positive from the day? What does that mean? You spoke about, can you give examples of how you figured out something to be positive from the day while in captivity? And how did you think about that?
Eli: First of all, about to choose, I knew that I didn’t choose to be kidnapped and not what happened to us on October 7th, that’s for sure. But I always chose how to react to situations. And I can cry all day and I can be, you know, positive and talk with the other hostages and pray and pray. I can do loads of things. This is all choices you have, that you can do or not to do in your day.
And I, you know, noticed that from time to time, the young guys, the young hostages didn’t have enough faith. And sometimes I was depressed from the day or from the situation. And it was very important for me that we’ll have this, you know, their faith, faith, it’s not something automatically coming to you, you need to work on that. And I noticed that we need something to lift up our spirits. So I knew that to talk about something good that’s happening to you, it’s like a muscle that you need to work on and give you an optimistic moment and will help you to survive the next day.
And they look at me like I’m insane, the first time I told them that. And they told me, well, we fell 50 meters underground. What can be good here? We are chained in our legs. We are humiliated on a daily basis. They use violence against us. They’re starving us. There’s darkness around us. And I said to them, I’m sure something good happened to us the same day.
And in the beginning, I forced them to say that. And each one of them start to say, and I think after two or three weeks, each one of them start to find 4, 5 things that could happen to me in the same day. And that was amazing, amazing moment in the evening, that it was something like 10, 15 things that good to that each that all of us said that happened to us.
And just for example, it can be another spoon of rice, sugar in the tea, if they gave us once a week, once or two weeks. The guy that brought the food is not the guy that humiliates you every day. Or this guy may be left at the tunnel for two or three days. So we don’t, we have now, three or two or three days without him. That’s an amazing thing. Or we will be able to sleep without a nightmare. It’s a great thing. So all these things, it’s good that they happen to you on the same day, give you lots of strength for the next day.
That was the idea and I was very, very proud of these guys, of the process we made and it gave us lots of strength.
Noam: Yeah, that’s unbelievable leadership by you in that moment. I keep on thinking about something else that you talk about in your book. I think about Hersh, Hersh shows up in your book. He’s a name that people like me and many others, I know his mother, I’ve had her on this podcast, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon, of course. And I always, I’ve been thinking about Hersh for the last couple of years as well. I even would say Hersh’s name whenever I went to Starbucks to order a drink. I would say that my name is Hersh in order for people to just know the name Hersh. The random Starbucks person in, I don’t know, North Carolina, I want them to know who Hersh is. I want them to say the name, say the name, say the name. So hearing Hersh’s voice, not his name, but his voice in your book also gave me strength.
He says this line, he who has a why can bear any how, which is reminiscent of Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. And it seemed like that was a big moment for you and for others. And you clearly had your why when you were 50 meters underground. Your why was Noya, Yahel, Lian. Your why was even yourself, Eli Sharabi. You knew that you wanted to live for yourself also. What’s your why now?
Eli: First of all, a few words about Hersh. If you mentioned him, amazing, amazing, intelligent guy. I wish he had a different end. Him and Ori Danino and Almog Sarusi that were with us. Unfortunately, their end was tragic. And I’m really, really sorry for his parents. And you all know his parents. It’s amazing, amazing people.
And so I really, and, and he influenced us a lot and with this sentence it just gave words for our behavior. And it was amazing for me, because I didn’t know the sentence before.
And and the why I have now, it’s, it’s a lot, I have loads of why because again I love life. I have a great amazing family that fought for me for 500 days. My friends stop their life as well and support my family and fought to me as well. And I can see all this Israel and the Jewish people around the world that pray for me and fought for the hostages and the hostage families. And I can be just grateful for that.
So I don’t have the privilege to stay in bed all day and cry. I don’t get any strength from sadness from, and to be angry, or self-pity. And again, I’m not, I’m not consider myself as a victim. So I’m trying not just, you know, to be in doing mode and I will have an amazing full life. I will rebuild my life. And as I said, that’s the way for me to memorialize my wife and my daughters and my brother.
Noam: I know you have a hard stop, so I want to ask you two more quick questions, Eli. Question number one is, you’ve experienced something that only one other living person has, coming out of captivity and finding your wife and children were murdered without knowing, without you knowing. Unlike Yarden Bibas, you’ve been really public and open. Are you guys talking behind the scenes? Do you find comfort and solidarity with him?
Eli: I’ve noticed, I’ve been in Washington to go to Mr. Trump and to President Trump and Mr. Witkoff. A month after my release, I’ve been in this delegation with a few other hostages and they start to talk about their experience from captivity and I’ve seen, it’s not good for me. It’s not doing any good for me.
I’m dealing with my situation and talking about my experience with my therapist and all this. So to talk with other hostages about our experience is not doing good for me. I’m not in a connection with Yarden. I hope for him he will have, you know, he’ll rebuild his life. I really, really hope for him. I know what I’m doing. It’s good for me. I don’t want to give any suggestion to other people.
Noam: Yeah. So my last question for you, Eli, is a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are not Jewish. Probably 50 to 60 percent are not Jewish and they’re from across the world. And I’m wondering what message you have for the Jewish people, for non-Jewish people, for all people listening to you. What’s the message that you have about the Jewish people, about Israel, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about your story? What’s the message that you want to leave everyone with?
Eli: First of all, to be united against terrorism and the Jewish communities with Israel, you know, will be appreciated if the world will see what we see and, you know, not hate us, just look at the facts. It will be amazing.
We know that it’s a lot of ignorance in the world about this conflict and people’s opinion based sometimes because they don’t know enough and maybe they have listened to social media, fake news or fake facts, I don’t know. So that’s what I can say. Before you say your opinion, and you don’t have to agree with me, and you can have disagreements, that’s fine. That’s not a problem. We have disagreements in Israel between us, between us, between our leadership. And it’s fine. That’s what is good in democracy. But, you know, just to hear about antisemitism in the world in 2025, not 1940s, and Jewish people that are afraid to walk in the streets where they live for such a long time, years by years, in the United States, United Kingdom, in Australia, anywhere. It’s a shame. It’s unbelievable.
And when I met prime ministers, when I meet the prime ministers and parliament members, what I’m saying to them is their responsibility to have a stronger voice against antisemitism.
Noam: Well, Eli, you are a source of strength, a source of inspiration. Your spirit is something that the Jewish people and all people need. I really believe that young people, Jewish people, all people need heroes to look up to. You didn’t ask to be a hero, but you are, you are. You are a hero. And I want to make sure that everyone checks out Hostage, Eli Sharabi’s book, I could not put it down. And Eli, I feel so grateful to have the opportunity to speak with you, someone I look up to, someone I’ve been davening for, someone that I’ve known for a couple years. You didn’t know me, but I’m just like anyone else in the world who has known you, who has been thinking about you. And it was a privilege to have a conversation with you. So thank you, Eli.
Eli: Thank you very much for having me. Bye.