500 Days After October 7, the Hostages are Still in Our Hearts
Content Warning: This piece contains reference to the October 7 terrorist attacks, including mentions of kidnapping and murder. Please read with care.
It has been 500 days since October 7, 2023. Hamas still holds 70 hostages in unspeakable conditions. Jewish people and their allies around the world are working for their release, telling their stories, and saying their names. Lidar, a Jewish Agency Israel Fellow based at a university in California, shared this story about his friend Sasha Troufanov, who was a hostage in Gaza for 498 days before being released this past weekend.
For Lidar, advocacy for his friend Sasha Troufanov, taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and released this past weekend on February 15, 2025, has become an important part of his work with Jewish college students. Sasha’s story also has become an inspiration to Lidar’s students at a time of increased antisemitism and isolation in their classes and on campus.
Lidar and Sasha became friends as young adults. “I was a little intimidated by him when we first met,” Lidar said. “He’s a big, tall, strong guy, and I was the new guy, and he wasn’t really talking to me. But then we went to an event together, and we started to talk, and I realized he was just the nicest guy. He was always smiling, always funny.”
Sasha’s parents lived on Kibbutz Nir Oz, which was brutally attacked on October 7, 2023. A day earlier, Sasha and his girlfriend, Sapir, had gone to visit his parents for Shabbat. The next morning, Hamas terrorists unleashed terror upon the kibbutz, murdering Sasha’s father, Vitaly, and taking Sasha and Sapir hostage, along with Sasha’s mother, Yelena, and grandmother, Irena. The three women were freed during the first hostage-release deal in November 2023, but Sasha remained in captivity until this weekend, with very little known about his condition.
“There were two videos of him released last year, but we didn’t know anything more, and none of the hostages who came home talked about seeing him,” Lidar said.
Sasha’s friends and family were given new hope recently when they learned that Sasha was on the list of hostages to be released in the first phase of this current hostage release and ceasefire deal, but they remained anxious about his condition. “Seeing Sasha come home alive was everything I could have hoped for over the last 16 months,” Lidar said.
In reflecting on Sasha’s time in captivity, Lidar said that he made sharing stories about his friend part of his daily routine. “One of Sasha’s habits was that every day at three o’clock, no matter what was happening or what he was doing, he’d have a coffee break,” Lidar said. “No matter what, three o’clock is coffee time. After he was kidnapped, some of his friends in Israel started doing ‘coffee for Sasha’ every day at three o’clock, and I started doing it here on campus. It was a way of pausing together and bringing some of his personality and his warmth everywhere we went.”
Thinking about how long Sasha was in captivity – and about the many hostages who remain in Gaza today – is difficult. “I remember the first Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror) after October 7, we all thought that there was no way we’d get to a year without the hostages coming home,” Lidar said. “And now it’s been 500 days, and it’s just not on people’s minds in the same way anymore.”
Lidar hopes that people around the world will continue to keep the remaining 70 hostages in their hearts and prayers, tell their stories, and work to secure their release. “While they’re still [in Gaza], we can’t fully breathe,” he said. “We all need to keep talking and remember that they’re still there, and we need to do everything in our power to get them back home.”
Hear from Israel Fellows across the country about their experiences in the aftermath of October 7 and how they are sharing their stories with Jewish students on college and university campuses.