Hostage’s father struggles to speak again in effort to bring his son home

After Passover, Tal Kuperstein, father of hostage Bar Kuperstein, sat in his wheelchair at Israel’s border with Gaza near Kibbutz Nir Oz and, shaking with emotion, yelled, “Bar! I am speaking again! You can come back.”

Kuperstein’s meaning was clear: If he could manage to learn to speak again after his stroke, Bar could somehow return home.

It’s been five years since Kuperstein lost his ability to speak. He had suffered a cerebral incident during surgery after being in a car accident while volunteering as a medic for the United Hatzalah ambulance service.

Now he is clawing his way back toward walking and talking after his eldest son, Bar, was taken hostage from the Nova desert rave on October 7, 2023, where he was working as a security guard during the festival.

“I don’t know how I got the strength,” said Kuperstein, his speech at times slurred but his intent clear.

He forced himself to speak again, said Ora Rubinstein, Bar’s aunt, a nurse who is often by her brother’s side.

“A month after Bar was taken captive, Tal decided he was going to do everything he could to fight and bring Bar back,” said Rubinstein. “And in every possible way, slowly, with help from so many good people he meets along the way. He’s at the Holon protests, rain or shine, he meets people and accepts their help.”

Rubinstein said that her brother needed confidence in order to allow himself to speak, even though it’s easier to ask his sister to speak for him.

“I feel that he’ll come home if I speak,” said Kuperstein, sitting next to his sister. His aide, Anel D’Souza, a foreign worker from India, is always at his side.

On Saturday, October 7, Bar had been working at the Nova with his best friend Din Tesler as part of a crew of security guards.

Tesler and Bar had been at the Nova desert rave since Thursday.

“It was my first time as a security guard,” Tesler told The Times of Israel. “Bar had worked for the company a few times before.”

When the rockets fired from Gaza began falling at 6:29 a.m., Bar and Tesler and the other guards opened an emergency exit and were helping treat wounded partygoers.

At that time, with rockets attacks countrywide, Bar’s grandmother called her grandson, knowing he was working as a security guard at some outdoor party. He told her he was fine and would head home as soon as they could get the partygoers on their way.

As Hamas terrorists began approaching from the direction of Kibbutz Be’eri, Bar told Tesler to go back into the festival while he remained on the main road with police officers to take care of those who were injured.

“That was the last time I saw him,” said Tesler, who has been traveling around the US since Bar was taken captive, speaking about what happened on October 7.

They later heard that Kuperstein returned several times to the site of the party to treat injured partygoers.

Tesler ran into the woods, at first with other partygoers who were eventually shot by terrorists. He hid in a cactus bush until he was rescued by IDF soldiers that evening.

That’s when Tesler realized that Bar was a hostage.

When he charged his phone, he saw that Bar’s brother had sent him a Telegram video showing Bar and five others in captivity.

The graphic video and photographs showing Bar tied up on the ground were posted by the Hamas terrorists who took them.

“I had my first panic attack. I could barely breathe when I realized my best friend was a hostage,” said Tesler.

“I had last texted with Bar around 9 a.m., and he wrote, “Please take care of my family if something happens,” said Tesler.

The extended Kuperstein family, including Bar’s parents, Tal and Julie, his four siblings, his grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins, all of whom live in Holon within easy walking distance of one another, were having the same kinds of reactions.

“We yelled, we screamed, and then we said, ‘What do we do now?'” said Rubinstein.

“Our luck was that we knew he was a captive, not because someone official told us, but because we saw him in that Telegram video,” she said, referring to the uncertainty surrounding many others who went missing during the attack.

Over the next two days, Tesler said, he found out that many of his friends had been either killed or taken hostage, including fellow security guards Eitan Mor, Andrey Kozlov and Rom Braslavski, all captives.

Kozlov was rescued in June, while Mor and Braslavski are still held hostage, along with Bar.

On April 5, the terror group Hamas released a propaganda video featuring Kuperstein and Maxim Herkin, a Nova partygoer, in the first sign of life from both hostages since they were abducted.

The family has spoken with released hostages, including Ohad Ben Ami, freed in February, who was kept with Bar for a while in the tunnels.

“He said his condition isn’t good, he’s in the tunnels,” said Rubinstein. “I saw the images of him from the video. He’s sad, he’s wan and pale.”

Rubinstein said that Bar looks better in the video than Ben Ami has described him, as her nephew lost more than 50% of his body weight.

“He looks a little better now because their Hamas captors started feeding them, assuming they would be released,” she said. “He was a little chubby before, he looked like his father,” gesturing to her brother.

The family learned other details about Bar in captivity. Always handy, he had fixed the electricity in the tunnels and helped arrange a crude plumbing setup in their underground cells.

“He loves to do things, he loves to help,” said Rubinstein.

“MacGyver!” said Tal, referring to the 1980s television show about a secret agent who performs complicated missions with the help of his knowledge of science and his Swiss Army knife.

It’s his nickname for his beloved son.

Bar has also learned some Russian because of spending time in captivity with Maxim Herkin, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen, said Rubinstein.

It brings their family history full circle, she said.

Her mother, Faina, Bar’s grandmother, was born in Moldova, while her father, Michael, a Holocaust survivor, narrowly escaped death in 1941 when his mother fled the Nazi advance in the Soviet Union and hid him in Tashkent — in what is now Uzbekistan — just months after his birth.

Bar’s father Tal and aunt Ora were both born in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The family immigrated to Israel in 1972, when Ora was 4 and Tal was still a baby.

“We don’t have Russian citizenship,” said Rubinstein, as anyone who fled the Soviet Union from the 1970s through 1991 didn’t receive citizenship.

Even so, the family has appealed to the Russian government to help free Bar, as Moscow did in November 2023 with former hostages Elena Troufanov and her mother Irena Tati.

And Kuperstein and his son Dvir are joining a Hostages Forum mission to Washington, DC, next week with his son Dvir, hoping for assistance from US President Donald Trump. The trip follows an op-ed piece that Kuperstein recently published in the American conservative media site The Daily Wire.

“As Israel marks its 77th Independence Day and President Donald Trump completes his first 100 days in office, my heart is somewhere else entirely: in the darkness of Gaza, where my son Bar remains in captivity — frail, frightened, and forgotten by far too many,” wrote Kuperstein.

In the letter, Kuperstein describes his son as a pillar of the family since his father’s accident five years ago.

“We’re doing everything we can,” said Rubinstein. “When you turn to the world, to Trump, that’s the most important thing. He should read Tal’s letter, and pay attention to his words. He’s asking Trump to help bring Bar back home.”