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Last Tuesday morning, a month after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel—a day now known as Black Sabbath—Matti Leshem and Lynn Harris, married movie producers, arrived at a back-yard gathering in West Los Angeles. It was a Hollywood crowd, assembled for a sombre purpose: to receive a delegation of survivors from Israel and families of hostages being held in Gaza.
Leshem, who specializes in Jewish subjects, is tall, and he wore a khaki blazer, a polka-dot pocket square, and a jockey cap; Harris had on big sunglasses, bluejeans, and a T-shirt that read “Bring Them Home Now.” Leshem is an Israeli citizen; his cousin’s two adult children were killed at a music festival that was a target of the attack. In the weeks since, he and Harris, along with many of their colleagues in the entertainment industry, have felt a sense of urgency. “Half my day is spent triaging people saying, ‘What can I do to help?’ ” Leshem said. “Normally, people are not selfless at all. They’re putting aside their schedules.”
Harris produces movies with the director Matt Reeves; for decades, she was a studio executive, overseeing commercial hits. She said, “My husband made an important Holocaust film, and I made ‘Hocus Pocus 2.’ ” She went on, “I consider myself a lucky Jew.” Her maternal grandparents left Germany in 1934, and her mother was born in Mandate Palestine. “My dad’s side are Russian Jews, red-diaper babies,” she said. “I’m first-generation American. Degrees of Judaism disappear in these moments.”
Leshem introduced the visitors. A volunteer for the Hostages and Missing Persons Family Forum, an advocacy group travelling with the delegation, said that, among the some two hundred and forty people taken captive, there were thirty-one children and fifty-seven elderly: two with autism, one with epilepsy, and others suffering from diabetes and dementia. Noting that the group had also made a stop in Palo Alto, visiting social-media executives, he urged them to “create content with the hostages in mind.”
Next was Batia Holim, who is seventy, and her daughter, Rotem, who is forty-four; both had lived at Kfar Aza, a kibbutz that borders Gaza. “On that Saturday, on the 7th, I’m supposed to have a community event that’s called afifonada,” Rotem said. “An afifon is a kite, and every Sukkoth since the seventies we are going to our football field. It’s the highest place in the kibbutz. You see the Gaza border.” She went on, “We fly our kites up in the sky with peace messages. We really thought that someday we can live side by side like neighbors. We don’t have to love each other, but we can live next to each other.”
Instead: incoming missiles. Rotem moved her sleeping children, who are five and seven, into the safe room, closed the shades, grabbed the children’s tablets and a bag of rolls, and shut herself in with them. As a kibbutz WhatsApp group filled with accounts of staggering brutality, Rotem heard terrorists enter her house. Men in black, carrying rifles, shot into the safe room. She explained to them, in English, that she was alone with her children. (Her husband was in a hospital in Tel Aviv.) She said, “They looked at me and my children. They have a little consultation in Arabic. Then my son asked if they are going to apologize. And then one of them came and told me, ‘I’m a Muslim, we are not going to hurt you.’ ”
The men ransacked the house and left; later, different terrorists returned. Rotem and her children stayed hidden in the safe room. It was thirty-two hours before the Israeli Defense Forces arrived to rescue them. “Besides me and one family, all my neighbors were murdered or kidnapped,” Rotem said. “My kids’ friends are now in Gaza. Four-year-olds, nine-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, mothers, elderly. You can’t even realize what happened to them.”
Eitan Gonen, a mechanical engineer who works for a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has a daughter, Romi, who was kidnapped from the music festival. She is twenty-three, a waitress in Tel Aviv. “She is sunshine,” he said. After the festival was attacked, he said, Romi hid in the bushes with a friend; he and her mother, who is his ex-wife, and her older sister stayed on the phone with Romi for nearly four hours. Finally, someone came with a car, but as Romi and her friend were escaping militants stopped them. “We heard everything,” Gonen said. Romi’s friend and the driver were killed. “My daughter Romi was shot in the hand. She was saying, ‘I’m going to die.’ ” Then silence. “We said, ‘Romi?’ No answer. ‘Romi?’ No answer. And then we heard Arab language on the phone. Two days later, we translated that to Hebrew, and basically what they said was, ‘O.K., this one is alive, let’s take her.’ ” Two weeks ago, the I.D.F. confirmed that Romi was being held in Gaza. Since then, Gonen has heard nothing, but he is confident. “Romi will be back,” he said. “I am sure.” ♦
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