He was just 21. His life story mirrored mine. Now I’m mourning him with hostage families in Tel Aviv.

Jessica Steinberg
December 5, 2024

I didn’t know Omer Neutra, but I felt like I could have.

The 21-year-old, until recently presumed to be a hostage in Gaza, was an American Jewish kid raised by his Israeli parents in Long Island, not far from where I was raised. He went to a Solomon Schechter day school, was a member of the Jewish youth movement USY, and spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah Nyack. He was accepted to study at my alma mater, SUNY Binghamton. We lived parallel-ish lives, 30 years apart.

Neutra never made it to Binghamton; after a year spent at a post-high school program in Israel, he told his parents he wanted to enlist in the army as a lone soldier, where he ended up becoming a tank platoon commander.

For the last 14 months, the assumption was that Neutra — last seen in Hamas video footage taken on the morning of Oct. 7, lying apparently injured on the ground outside his tank at the Gaza border — was a hostage, held in Gaza. But new IDF findings and intelligence information led the IDF to declare that he had in fact died on Oct. 7, and his body has been held in Gaza since.

So Omer’s family is mourning him without being able to bury him. His parents and brother held a memorial service Tuesday morning at their Long Island synagogue, Midway Jewish Center, while his Israeli family, his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins have been mourning him here, near their homes in Ra’anana and in Tel Aviv.

Now they have to get his body back from Gaza.

How many more of these tragedies can we take before our government takes seriously the plight of the 101 remaining hostages — many of whom are now presumed dead — and the agony of their loved ones?

Neutra’s story echoes so many other heartbreaking hostage stories, like that of Tamir Adar from Kibbutz Nir Oz, or Guy Illouz, taken from the Nova party and killed in Gaza, both of their bodies held in Gaza.

That resonance was clear on Tuesday night, in Tel Aviv, at a memorial event in Hostages Square. Neutra’s friends and relatives, and plenty of kids who probably didn’t know him, sat in a circle on the pavement, his name spelled out in tealights, as they sang songs of mourning and sadness. Some of them wore white hoodies featuring Neutra’s smiling face and the words “Team Omer” on the back.

Neutra’s grandmother, Tamar, his aunt, Genia, and his cousin — as well as another hostage mother, Yael Alexander, whose son, Edan, is still held hostage, and was also a lone soldier — all spoke. They remembered a beloved grandson, son, brother, nephew, cousin and friend, whom his Israeli family got to know even better when he came to Israel, presumably spending many Shabbatot and holidays with them. His grandmother spoke of a conversation Neutra had with his parents on Oct. 6, 2023, when he told them that after weeks of dealing with a steady stream of Hamas activity at the border, his unit was told to stand down and have a more relaxing weekend.

Even Neutra himself spoke, via a radio recording from a few years ago, when he called in to Galei Tzahal to request a song for his unit.

But amid all the grief, one small thing heartened me: the very large crowd present. Hundreds, maybe even a thousand, people came to listen to these women grieve a young man they deeply loved.

I hadn’t been to one of the standard Tuesday night Hostage Square gatherings, which often adopt a more subdued and less political tone, in a long time, and I was moved by the crowds. In the hour before the memorial for Neutra, there were discussion circles held around the Square, organized by Zikaron BaSalon, a group that has long organized living room conversations with Holocaust survivors on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Each of these circles was focused on a hostage family member, speaking about their loved one. Each family member — including Michel Illouz, Batsheva Yahalomi, Liri Albag’s sisters, and Guy Meyer, a cousin of twin brothers Ziv and Gali Berman — told us stories about what happened on Oct. 7, about their families.

I listened to Meyer, who talked about how her aunt, the twins’ mother, is renovating two small kibbutz houses so that her boys will have somewhere to live when they come home to Israel.

The houses have a connecting door between them, so that the twin brothers can visit whenever they want. Their mother spent their birthday — their second in captivity — sitting in the two houses, so that she could feel their presence.

In another circle, a Hostages Forum volunteer made a pitch to the two dozen or so people seated around him, to keep fighting for the hostages.

“Do one thing each day and one thing each week to keep the hostages in the discourse,” he said, suggesting that people spend the first 10 minutes of each day, whether in school or at work, speaking about a hostage, and then plan to attend something — a protest, rally, gathering, event — each week, for the hostages.

“Otherwise we become a society at war and with hostages” — permanently, he said.

That message stayed with me. Everyone is holding on to their beliefs and narratives in this unending situation, following the news that matters to them, the situations and politics that speak to them. But we can be forced to think outside our boxes and consider the other aspects of this situation, and especially that of the hostages in Gaza.

At the very end of the evening, I realized why Omer’s aunt Genia looked so familiar to me. We had both been on an organized trip to Italy for several years in a row, and had chatted a few times in hotel lobbies.

Our circles and worlds had overlapped. It is all our responsibility to feel their grief as our own. Right now, my heart is theirs.

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