After the unthinkable, Rachel Goldberg‑Polin helps others grieve
"I think I've done what every single person in my position would have done. It's what your mother would have done for you, and it's what my mother would have done for me.”
Romina Ruiz-Goiriena- Rachel Goldberg-Polin became a prominent advocate for hostages after her son, Hersh, was taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
- She has received tens of thousands of messages from people worldwide sharing their own stories of grief and loss.
- Goldberg-Polin continues to speak about grief, offering a message that it is something to live with, not get over.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin is one of USA TODAY’s 2026 Women of the Year, a recognition of women who have made a significant impact in their communities and beyond. Meet this year's honorees here.
Maybe, for the first time since her son’s death, Rachel Goldberg-Polin can grieve.
Or so she told her therapist.
But how would it happen?
Goldberg-Polin imagines herself in a grocery store. In the aisle, she’d spot a box of Cap’n Crunch on the shelf. Her son’s favorite cereal, the peanut butter kind, would trigger some kind of flashback. That’s when, unprompted, she’d fall screaming onto the floor of Kroger.
Her scene of grieving plays out that way, Goldberg-Polin deadpans to USA TODAY, “because that’s what happens on TV.”
The delivery is vintage Goldberg-Polin, her friends say. But she hasn’t made it to the grocery store yet – going out in public is too hard. People easily recognize her petite frame, even under the hat, parka and big glasses.
“I’m still very much this symbol of pain and a trigger for a lot of people’s trauma,” Goldberg-Polin says.
She is the embodiment of every mother’s worst nightmare: losing a child. Except she didn’t simply lose her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He was taken. Tortured. Maimed. He was held captive by Hamas for 328 days in underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip after the militant group’s assault on Israel Oct. 7, 2023. Before her 23-year-old son could be rescued, he was executed. Her commitment to save as many of the 251 hostages as possible from the throes of Hamas captivity never wavered, even after Hersh was returned to her in a body bag. Goldberg-Polin, 56, became one of the most recognizable advocates born of the more than two-year Israel-Hamas war.
Goldberg-Polin tallied each day of the hostages’ detention. She wrote the number on a piece of masking tape for all to see. And we counted with her.
She took planes. She made speeches. She mixed with global elites in Davos, Switzerland. On day 47, she had an audience with Pope Francis. On day 320, she addressed the Democratic National Convention. She traveled to four continents. She met with world leaders, even some who scared her, in undisclosed locations. (One time, she was so afraid, she wrote down part of Psalm 118 – God is with me, I shall not fear ... – on a piece of paper and stuffed it into her bra.)
She first spoke to me on day 694. We sat for an interview on a bench in New York’s Central Park on day 703.
That’s where I learned that while necessity might have catapulted Goldberg-Polin onto the geopolitical stage, her deepest impact was burgeoning at a much more intimate level. Quietly, thousands of people got in touch. First came the emails, the one-liners on Facebook Messenger. Strangers pinged her on WhatsApp. The messages came from Idaho. Fiji. South Africa. Jews, Christians and Muslims. Some sent heart emojis or “Thinking of you.” Others unveiled their own tragedies, their own accounts of loss.
Some had lost children and siblings to suicide and overdose. Not all had lost someone, but all were in pain. The numbers vary, but the notes keep coming.
“Some days it's 93, some days it's 112,” Goldberg-Polin says. “But it's always hovering right around 100.”
A quick multiplication reveals that’s 84,000 or so messages.
“Some people are writing about losing a parent, or a partner, or a sibling, or a best friend, or a child,” she says. “And they're from all different walks of life and, also, from all different faiths, which I find that to be so uniting.”
The missives continued even past Jan. 26, 2026, day 843, when the remains of the final hostage, Ran Gvili, were returned to his family, completing the first phase of a ceasefire agreement.
That night, Goldberg-Polin noticed she breathed differently. The next morning, for the first time in more than two years, she didn’t put a piece of masking tape marked with a number counting the war’s days over her heart.
The world began to move on. But not from Goldberg-Polin.
Messages haven’t stopped coming in. On a recent Friday, there were 103. The leaders of schools and nonprofits keep asking her and her husband, Jon, to speak.
“And I keep thinking, ‘Why?’” Goldberg-Polin asks over Zoom from her Jerusalem apartment. “The story is over. Hersh’s story is tragically over. The hostage story for me is over, so it’s not clear for me. I’m not a story of resilience and I’m not a story of hope.”
Her Orthodox Jewish observance, which brings order to her life through prayer, Torah study, keeping kosher and avoiding driving and using electronics on the Sabbath, helps her survive what she sees as a story of grief. It’s a narrative this lifelong educator born in Chicago shares over and over. With a mix of anecdotes, wisdom and talk of spirituality, she gives people language to know what they are experiencing. She mothers the bereaved – for who hasn’t known what it is like to experience loss? In a society that expects grief to eventually go away, like in a Hallmark movie, Goldberg-Polin has a revolutionary proposition: to live with it forever.
Her heart breaks open, creating a prism that teaches us something about her, but really, it’s there teaching us something about ourselves. And in a time of political silos, echo chambers that are served as the catch of the day, polished influencer feeds and a cacophony of quotes to swipe endlessly – her cadence, her analogies, her stories remind us of what it’s like to be human.
Earlier this year, she found herself trying to explain grief to a group of college students. How does it feel? they asked.
Always the teacher, she didn’t answer outright. She walked them through an exercise.
Everybody, think of someone, she told them. It could be your boyfriend. It could be your mother. It could be your best friend, your dog. Whoever.
She paused, “Now, they are not in this room.”
“Do you not love them anymore?” she asks. “When it's someone who's so integral to your day-to-day well-being, how are we going to make that a healthy way of loving them and missing them where it's not breaking us?”
We might get some insight into her answer in her memoir, “When We See You Again,” to be published April 21.
Goldberg-Polin insists she isn’t a role model but rather a “really regular person” caught up in a horrible situation. The vigil she kept and the efforts she made, she says, weren’t unusual.
“It’s what your mother would have done for you, and it’s what my mother would have done for me,” she says.
Looking straight into the camera, her realness is what draws us to her. What helps us understand her pain. And ours.
“It's very affirming that it is pain that is so universal,” Goldberg-Polin says. “It's really symbiotic because I think that they think they're reaching out for help, and they're actually really helping me. So, there's this wave-like experience where we meet in the middle.”
Our time is up. The Sabbath is upon us, and she is powering down.
Before I go, she speaks again about her beautiful boy, Hersh. Because she lost him, he will never feel this pain. Then she returns to something we chatted about during our last conversation more than 100 days ago. Has your son decided where he’ll go to college in the fall? she asks.
She always shares about her boy and always checks in on mine.
A testament to the enduring power of a mother's love – even my own.
Romina Ruiz-Goiriena is USA TODAY's Executive Editor of Investigations and Storytelling and a former international correspondent. Follow her on X, @RominaAdi.