College Principal
From the Principal’s Desk: Remembering
Last week the Senior School prefects and Jewish Life team ran an incredibly moving October 7 memorial assembly. They created an installation hallway with photos, artefacts and stories of victims to walk through on the way in to the assembly. The assembly was deeply meaningful, sombre and with a message of hope for the future. I was and remain, lost for words. We heard a very personal account from our Acting Head of Jewish Life, Shoshana Gottlieb. Below are her words:
My story starts about 2 years ago. Before I worked at Masada, before I was a teacher at all, I was living in Jerusalem, studying Torah and experiencing all of the wonderful things that Israel has to offer.
One Shabbat dinner, I went to my friend Myahn’s house. I don’t remember who else was there, I don’t remember what we ate, but I remember the warmth of sitting around the Shabbat table, talking and laughing with my friends.
There’s a fun little tradition in Judaism called ‘simcha benchers.’ A bencher is a booklet, kind of like the laminated sheets we give out at camp. It contains the Birkat HaMazon, the Grace After Meals, the words of Kiddush, and various songs we sing on Shabbat. It’s not uncommon to have bentschers designed for weddings or bar and bat mitzvahs.
At Myahn’s house, I was serendipitously handed a bar mitzvah bentscher belonging to some kid named Hersh Goldberg Polin, and it was different than the other ones there. It was filled with pictures of Hersh and his family, from when he was born, to him as a toddler, to him as a scrawny tween. But best of all, in the front and back pages, were special parody songs written to Hersh, by his grandmothers, Safta Leah and Bubba Marcy.
My friends and I spent all night singing these songs about some kid we didn’t know. Think, Old MacDonald Had A Farm or Edelweiss, but the lyrics were about Hersh. We were enamoured by Hersh, enthralled by the love of his family we felt emanating from the pages.
Now, we all know that the Jewish world is small. Tiny in fact. All Jews know each other. And after Shabbat, I posted about Hersh on my Instagram story. Somebody sent it to him, and he reached out to me. He sent me a picture of him with his Safta Leah, he sent me pictures of his sister’s bat mitzvah bentchers that also had personalised songs. He told me that he had always wanted to be famous, he just didn’t think this is how it would happen.
Hersh and I kept in touch, messaging at random, replying to each others Instagram stories. Also in the Jewish tradition, I tried to get him to marry my friend Myahn, so that his grandmothers would write songs for their wedding.
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Hersh GP, my long distance friend, was abducted from the Nova Festival, and taken into Gaza. When I saw his name and photo in the newspapers, it felt like getting sucker punched. I still remember the way it felt like ice was coursing through me, how I felt frozen, staring at the boy who had crossed my path not long ago.
For a long time, my long distance, casual friendship with Hersh had been the punchline to a silly anecdote. But, like a lot of the world, Hersh became the epicentre of my grief and pain. His parents managed to turn Hersh into a symbol for millions of people, a symbol of the endless torture that Israelis are enduring as they wait for their loved ones to return, and for the war to end. I’m sure you’ve all seen images of Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, standing next to presidents and prime ministers, pleading with the world to help their son, and the hundreds of other hostages.
Hersh was held captive for almost 11 months, until he and five other hostages were killed by Hamas at the end of August this year. There are others who knew him better than I did, whose grief overwhelms them daily, who will carry the loss of Hersh with them in every moment for the rest of their lives. I am just someone who happened across Hersh by chance.
But one thing I have learned this past year is that grief belongs to the collective just as it belongs to the individual. Grief for our siblings in Israel who are still hostages, grief for the thousands of Israelis who have faced more than a year of war. Grief for a world before October 7th.
I think everybody always expects teachers to have a lesson to impart, but I don’t think I have one today. All I have is this story, a silly story with a tragic ending. Thank you for listening. Thank you for remembering Hersh.
Raquel Charet
College Principal
