Hostage’s mother asks Diaspora Jews to press government to make prisoner swap

Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter

Rachel Goldberg speaks at a conference in Jerusalem on March 20, 2024. (Canaan Lidor/Times of Israel)
Rachel Goldberg speaks at a conference in Jerusalem on March 20, 2024. (Canaan Lidor/Times of Israel)

At a conference on Jewish peoplehood in wartime, the mother of a hostage urges Diaspora Jews to pressure Israeli leaders to make a deal for retrieving the 134 Israelis who are held captive by Hamas.

“Now is the time for the Diaspora to tell [this to] the leaders of this country, who are not thinking straight because they are still speaking from a place of continual, unending, throbbing, sharp, ongoing guilt-ridden trauma,” Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, tells hundreds of people at the World Zionist Organization’s Heschel Conference on Jewish Peoplehood.

“Now is the time to save 134 innocent souls for no other reason except that it is holy, and it is the most Jewish response to October 7th that can possibly be done,” adds Goldberg, whose family immigrated to Israel from the United States in 2008.

Of the hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7, 130 remain in Gaza, not all of them alive. The terror group also holds, for nearly the past decade, two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.

Hamas representatives and Israeli officials are negotiating the terms of a second prisoner swap but substantial gaps are said to remain in the indirect talks in Qatar.

The main panel of the conference at the National Library in Jerusalem, which is taking place for the second time following its inaugural event in 2022, centers on the relationship of the Jewish population of Israel and that of North America.

One of the panelists, Yossi Beilin, a former justice minister and a founder of Taglit-Birthright, calls for the establishment of a regular forum for cooperation between Israeli delegates and representatives of North American Jewry over issues such as the definition of who is a Jew.

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