Ariel Bibas will turn five in Gaza captivity on Monday
Family say that instead of a birthday party, they will hold a march on Aug. 5 to call for the release of the Bibas family and all the hostages still held by Hamas
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
The extended Bibas family will mark hostage Ariel Bibas’ fifth birthday on Monday, August 5 with a march from Tel Aviv’s Habima Square to Hostages Square.
It’s a birthday no one wants to forget but will be painful to mark, said Maurice Shnaider, a great uncle to Ariel Bibas and his younger brother Kfir, and uncle to Ariel’s mother, Shiri, also held hostage in Gaza, as is Yarden Bibas, the boys’ father and Shiri’s husband.
“We don’t know if Shiri knows that Monday is August 5,” said Shnaider. “Does she have a calendar? Does she count down the days?”
Ariel, the now-familiar redhead, a lover of Batman, won’t have a cake or gift or blow out any candles, said Shnaider.
Instead, the family will march in protest and publicize a video of Ariel recorded at his fourth birthday party at the Kibbutz Nir Oz nursery.
“The world needs to understand the situation that allows these little boys to mark their birthdays as hostages,” said Shnaider, speaking to The Times of Israel. “The most brave boy in the world will celebrate his fifth birthday in captivity.”
Ariel Bibas and his baby brother Kfir, who turned one in captivity, were taken hostage with their mother, Shiri Bibas, on October 7, as she clutched them in her arms, wrapping them with a baby blanket and was pushed out of her home by Hamas terrorists.
Their father, Yarden Bibas, was taken hostage separately. Since then, there have been scraps of information about the couple and their redheaded boys, but no real evidence of their whereabouts.
“There are many redheads on our side of the family and on Yossi’s as well,” said Shnaider, guessing that if Ariel or his baby brother, Kfir, had been born with black hair, like their father Yarden, “everything would have been different.”
Shnaider said there has been much speculation that the terrorists knew and identified the Bibas family beforehand because of the boys’ striking red hair.
He described the attack on October 7, as Yarden Bibas shot at the terrorists from inside the house, noting that the terrorists didn’t shoot into the home, unlike in other houses and locations.
“They waited until he stopped shooting and then broke the door down and took them and filmed them,” said Shnaider.
Shnaider said he was watching the unfolding news of the October 7, Hamas attack when he suddenly saw the image of his niece, Shiri, holding the two redheaded boys and “blew up,” he said.
“I started screaming like crazy, ‘That’s Shiri, that’s Shiri,'” he said.
Shnaider is the older brother of Shiri’s mother, Margit, who was killed along with her husband, Shiri’s father, Yossi Silberman, in their Kibbutz Nir Oz home on October 7.
He has lived in the US since 1981, after first moving to Israel with his parents and siblings from Argentina in 1971.
Shnaider visited his extended family in January 2023 for a family event, but didn’t see Shiri, who was pregnant with Kfir at the time. It was the last time he saw his sister, Margit.
Shnaider said that as he sat shiva in New York, mourning his sister, he expected a small number of visitors, perhaps the quorum of ten he needed to say the mourner’s kaddish.
“Close to 800 people came,” he said. “They all said, ‘Describe your sister.'”
“It’s hard to describe a person when you love them, I don’t know how to describe love,” said Shnaider. “She was an angel.”
It would have been Margit Silberman’s birthday on July 30, just a week before her grandson, Ariel’s fifth birthday.
Shnaider described the front yard of his sister’s home in Nir Oz as full of toys for Ariel.
“It was a big mess of toys, just for Ariel to come and have fun,” he said.
He said his sister was a gentle soul who always spoke in a soft voice, even when she was angry.
She was the kind of person who wouldn’t kill the tiny ants in her kitchen, a familiar sight in the Israeli heat, “she would just say, ‘Shoo, shoo,'” said Shnaider.
“As a grandmother, she acted the way my mother did for her kids,” he said.
Shnaider hadn’t been in Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7, until he visited two weeks ago for the first time, for just eight days.
“I said I was going to go when they came home, and I thought it would take a week, two weeks, then it was months, nine months, and at ten months I said enough, ‘I need their support,'” said Shnaider.
While Shnaider has been active in local New York area protests and rallies for the hostages, he is fearful of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in his community of Kingston, New York, and won’t put up signs in his yard for the hostages or supporting Israel.
“I have to protect my house and my family,” said Shnaider. “The only sign we have is ‘We don’t believe in hate.'”
Now, said Shnaider, he’s waiting for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sign a hostage deal.
“We can’t wait another six months until another government comes into power,” he said. “We need to support who we have today, we have Biden today, we have Bibi today.”
Shnaider said he wants to tell Netanyahu not to tell his family that he understands their pain and suffering.
“If you understood what we felt, you’d be doing something,” he said. “Another day will come to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah, there will be more days for that. Release the little boys and release every single hostage.”
