In Case I Ever Get Kidnapped

An essay excerpt from "Ruptured"

Aug 08, 2025

What is it like being Jewish now in Australia? Read Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7, a powerful essay collection edited by Dr. Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch, to find out.

Books are available for purchase at Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, CA and through this link.

A few years ago, my daughter Amalia, then aged six, found a Magen David necklace at home and told me she’d like to wear it to school. “I want everyone to know that I’m Jewish,” she said. Bless, I thought. Her school is as Jewish as can be. She had just learnt about the biblical super-heroine, Esther, who had to hide her Jewish identity only to later reveal it to save her people. How lucky we are to live in our times, I mused.

Three years on and our world has been upended. The long shadow of hate, cast by the events of October 7, arrived on our distant shores quickly. Students from Jewish schools now conceal identifying features of their school uniforms and bags on public transport. Some Jews have removed their mezuzah, the ritual talisman on their doorpost which marks it a Jewish home.

As much as I try to shield my children, the hate seeps through. We are at a stop sign when Rahni, my five-year-old, cranes her neck to inspect a sticker on it and says, “Ima, there’s an Israel flag with a red line through it.” She then explains in earnest, “I think that means they hate Israel.” A few days later, Amalia sees defaced hostage posters at the park and asks, “But why would someone do that?” I can see her eyes brim with tears, her lip quivers. This is her first encounter with such contempt for human life.

My husband and I don’t believe in keeping secrets – for intuitive children, not knowing can be just as scary as knowing. In any case, kids can stumble across distressing information online or be exposed to it through their friends. We think we are clever parents, because we practice the art of framing – carefully choosing when, how and what to explain – but we inevitably leave a hole here and there, and there is nothing as insatiable as a child who knows there is more to know. We try to leapfrog the hate by highlighting the things that show Jewish people as resilient and united. We show the girls videos of displaced Israeli kids receiving gifts from diaspora communities, and take them to a local warehouse where our community volunteers are packing and dispatching huge shipments of presents and needed goods.

We are selective about what we reveal, but as time passes the war is only accelerating, the hostages aren’t coming home, and anti-Jewish hate is pulsing across the globe. Our mission feels like a mission impossible. Amalia is haunted by a story she overheard at school about a baby that was found in an oven on October 7. Her cousins call while they are in the bomb shelter, and she asks whether the Iron Dome ever fails. How can we avoid discussing what is happening in her country of birth or what it means to be a Jew, especially an Israeli Jew, in the post-October 7 world? Amalia was born in Jerusalem, just like her father and her grandmother, a fact that she wears as a badge of honor. We don’t want to diminish her ancestral pride but worry what might happen if she tells the wrong person where she was born. Usually, we would send her to holiday activities which suit her personality and give her a chance to befriend kids outside of the Jewish community, but we pare back the list of options – no creative arts in Prahran, no coding camp north of the Yarra.

We clip her wings for now and send her to a local Jewish camp.

***

I was brought up from a young age with a certain awareness that the world is not to be trusted. My late mother was born and raised in the nascent State of Israel, my father in a German town where concentration camp survivors gathered to look for relatives and friends before resettling in places like Melbourne, the city of my birth. My mother swapped the varied landscapes of Israel for the gumtrees of Australia. She named me after the palm trees of the Sinai Peninsula, which was handed over to Egypt around the time of my birth. She grieved from afar for the desert communities in Sinai, uprooted for the promise of peace with what felt like untrustworthy neighbors. Always dramatic, she said her breast milk ran dry from the tears.

I grew up feeling proud of my hybrid identity and always loved emphasizing that my name was the Israeli Tamar, not Tamara, pronounced with an r that rolls off the tongue. As a young child I felt special having two passports, even though my mother – the Entebbe hostage crisis still fresh in her mind – told me to keep one hidden in case our flight was hijacked. I remember how she would sing along wistfully to the music on the Israeli community radio while preparing for Shabbat. Occasionally, I’d hear some shocking news filtering through the airwaves, of wars and suicide bombings in Israel. My mother would frantically call around to check that everyone was safe.

Looking back, my childhood home in peaceful Australia exuded the Israeli spirit of my mother – exuberant, loud, emotional – as well as the quiet, industrious stoicism of the diaspora survivors on my father’s side. I was grateful for the way these forces ran through me, and felt they made me strong and ready to take on an unpredictable world. I had hoped that my girls would grow strong too, without having to put their strength to the test.

***

I am on my way out to dinner. Rahni says to me, “Ima, my babysitters never say Shema with me.” Shema is the ultimate Jewish prayer, both an affirmation of faith in one God, and a nighttime prayer that parents recite, beseeching the angels to protect their children. I ask Amalia to say Shema with Rahni that night. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t get it 100 percent right,” I say. Last time I checked, she was still fumbling over the words despite having heard them every day since she was born. Amalia’s eyes light up and she exclaims proudly, “It’s ok, I have been practicing – in case I ever get kidnapped.” My heart drops.

No matter that we stop watching the news in the children’s presence, that we speak about the escalating antisemitism in Hebrew and not English. Our attempts to control Amalia’s exposure to the chaos in the world is clearly not working. We may have shielded her from the images of October 7, but she is playing reels in her mind that I cannot pause.

Several days later, she comes home from school with a ‘sensory poem’ she penned:

WORRIED.
Worry is all I can think about.
It looks like war.
It sounds like screams.
It smells like smoke.
It tastes rotten.
It feels like the hate of another country.

I see it now – kids learn the art of dot-to-dot and fill in the spaces with their imagination. With her grandmother and cousins all living in Israel, the stress of war is ever-present for Amalia, despite the distance. She often asks about the hostages and collects postcards of their faces from our local Jewish grocery store. Some days she is angry that her teachers won’t speak about the war; some days she is angry when they do. “I just want this nightmare to be over!” she rages one day. I say I feel the same way. We talk about despair and hope, and about the power of taking action. I show her the tote bag of KIDNAPPED posters and packing tape that I keep in my car; and the STOP THE HATE stickers and fat textas I use to erase antisemitic graffiti, which sit in my handbag alongside pretzels, fruit straps and hand moisturizer.

A package of yellow ribbons arrives for an event I am organizing in support of the hostages. Amalia helps herself to a roll and takes it to school. She comes home excited that she has done something impactful. Apparently, the kids and teachers all wanted a strand of ribbon to pin on their jumper, joining the call to release the hostages. She needs another roll, she says. Together we are finding ways to hold onto hope.

***

If Amalia is our poet-in-residence, then Rahni is our resident problem-solver. She has a plan on how to end the war. “I’ll write to Hamas and tell him that he is not nice. If I see him, I’ll kick him in the nuts,” she declares. She is not old enough to understand that Hamas is not one person, that it is a pernicious mindset spreading across the globe. That the stickers she spots around town are propaganda, that dehumanization and demonization of Jews is a weapon.

Instead, Rahni does what children do – she follows her senses. She starts to see the world through a new color prism: blue and white are for Israel; yellow is for the hostages; and the combination of green, red and white makes her uneasy. I cautiously point out that many of the world’s flags use a mix of these three colours, and that perhaps the only color she needs to be wary of is the green on the headband worn by Hamas terrorists. She shrugs her shoulders. Discussing degrees of hate is hard to do with a five-year-old, but she listens as I explain the difference between the Palestinian people and Hamas, saying that many Palestinians suffer under Hamas too. From then on she whoops, “Boo Hamas!” whenever she sees green, and her sister pinches her and tells her to shush in case someone hears.

Perhaps I should retract my ill-conceived color lesson, but instead I laugh at her sweet bravado.

***

I have never felt my identities as a mother and a Jew activated as powerfully and urgently as in these times. The world in which I was once fluent and comfortable, feels alien and untrustworthy. I worry endlessly about my husband, with his unmistakable Israeli accent as he keeps traveling abroad for work (though he has stopped flying solo to Europe where the street protests have turned especially vicious). I navigate public spaces with a primitive hyper-vigilance now, especially when my daughters are with me, envious of those who float around without a care, as I once did. Who are these people around us? Friends, foes, fence-sitters? My senses alert, I urgently scan the train station for indicators of possible anti-Jewish hostility, and for the kindest-looking person – someone who would help shield my children if the situation required it.

But who is kind enough these days? When even leading children’s and human rights organizations are unwilling to advocate for the world’s youngest hostages, Kfir and Ariel Bibas? I fight against my own cynicism to avoid being swallowed by it. How can I teach my children to be defined by who they are and not by the hate around them, when I feel like this? Do I have it in me to teach them not to hate back? I want my girls to navigate the world with the confidence I was gifted – aware of hate, but not afraid the way I am these days.

Right now, we Jews are shrinking into ourselves, finding comfort and safety in insularity, but I desperately hope that my girls will re-emerge into a safer, and kinder, world.

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