When I Think of Them | In Honor of October 7th

By Ellen Usatin
Published by American Russian-Speaking Jews Alliance on October 8, 2025
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I’ve always known I was Jewish.

Not because of how I looked—my features never told the full story. My nose wasn’t the kind that drew whispers, my hair didn’t curl into the tight ringlets of old family photos. Strangers often try to place me: French? Spanish-speaking? Turkish, maybe? To the untrained eye, I’m something just out of reach. But Jews always know. They see the flicker. The sadness in the eyes. The quiet ache. The way I scan the horizon, as if I’ve misplaced a piece of myself in some far-off place.

I feel it too—this ancient frequency that hums beneath the surface, a whisper stitched into bone. Wherever I go, I find them, and they find me. There is no handshake, no ceremony. Just a knowing. An unspoken inheritance that defies geography.

In my office, a mezuzah guards the doorway. On the bookshelf, a tiny, hopeful book leans against an old journal: Israel – Tiny Land, Beautiful Country. A declaration, a longing, a complicated love letter.

I’ve only been to Israel twice—once with wonder in my eyes, and once with questions in my heart.

The first time was in 2015, when I joined a women’s trip organized by the Jewish Renaissance Project. I boarded the plane not knowing what I was searching for—only that I needed to be found. And when I arrived, it happened: the ground shifted. It was like seeing a rainbow for the first time and struggling to describe it to a blind person. Something cracked open in me. I was home.

I wandered Jerusalem with the awe of a child, feet tracing stones worn smooth by centuries of longing. I drank lemonada at a street café, eyes tracing the stories written into faces around me. I got lost in the winding alleys of the Old City and was gently steered by a Muslim shopkeeper who graciously helped me find my way. I drank sweet tea with Bedouins under the silent expanse of the Negev sky. I floated in the Dead Sea, where the salt burned my skin but left my spirit buoyant, weightless, released.

One evening, I attended a lecture by an Iranian Jewish lawyer—one of the bravest women I’ve ever encountered—as she spoke of her life’s work battling terrorism through the legal system. I remember sitting in stillness, overwhelmed by the sense that I was part of something much larger than myself.

And I wept at the Western Wall—not because I had planned to, but because my body remembered something my mind had forgotten. As I descended the steps of the Aish building, my legs trembled. My heart pounded like a prayer. When the Wall came into view, time stopped. It was as if my whole life flashed in front of my eyes. I wasn’t just myself; I was every version of myself. Every ancestor. Every woman who had stood there and whispered into stone.

A few years later, on my second visit, everything felt different; the initial enchantment had faded. The cracks I’d chosen not to see before were now impossible to ignore: the noise, the chaos, the sirens, the absence of green, the jarring fragmentation. There was no gentle current of community this time. I was told, matter-of-factly, that being secular in Israel drew invisible walls. “The Orthodox don’t like us,” someone said with a shrug. The air felt tense, divided—thick with opinion, thinned by unity. I left feeling strangely displaced in a land that was supposed to be mine. I had the privilege to walk its streets, and yet I still stood outside the gate. I was once again “the other,” an outsider looking in.

Back home, I returned to the rhythm of life. I put the longing away in the drawer that holds the quiet dreams I carry but rarely speak of. I told myself: belonging isn’t for everyone. Some of us are made to linger on the margins, to ask questions instead of planting flags.

And then life did what it always does. It pressed forward. I became a body in motion, moving through all the expected roles: mother, partner, friend, professional. But then midlife arrived—not as a whisper, but a wrecking ball. It unspooled everything. I found myself questioning the very architecture of my life: the relationships I once clung to, the work I had poured myself into, the very way I moved through the world. Grief arrived, too. I lost someone I loved deeply, and the sorrow flooded me like a violent tide. I tried to swim through it, but the current was relentless. Just when I surfaced for air, another wave pulled me back under. I longed for someone—a parent, a sibling—to tell me, this too shall pass. But those voices weren’t there.

In that darkness, I found comfort in silence. Long, solitary hikes with my dog became my refuge. In the stillness of the woods, I found a strange kind of peace. In the hush of the forest, I discovered a kind of salvation. The earth beneath my feet steadied me. There was something ancient in that connection—something spiritual and grounding.

And then—October 7th happened.

I still don’t have words for what that day broke in me. The horror was crushing, but so too was the world’s response. The silence, the cold disavowals, the finger-pointing. Suddenly, being Jewish meant being suspect. Zionism became a slur. You had to apologize for your people, for your roots, for your survival. You had to choose: be tolerated or be true.

But this reflection is not about that. History will write its own pages. These days, I try not to dwell in politics or identity. I try not to let those questions swallow me whole. Instead, I think of them.

The hostages. The nameless ones. The women, the children, the elders. Still there. Still waiting.

I think of them when I wake up and see the sun rise. When did they last feel sunlight?
When I take a hot shower. Do they have access to clean water?
When I slice a piece of bread. Are they hungry?
When I hug my children. Can they hug theirs?
When I collapse from exhaustion. How do they survive such pain?

And I ask myself, again and again: Why do I care so much?

I don’t know them. I’ve never met them. If we were strangers at a café, we might not even connect. And yet, my heart breaks for them.

Why?

Perhaps because autonomy and freedom are my deepest values.
Perhaps because Judaism isn’t just my religion—it’s the language of my soul.
Perhaps because I know what it’s like to be silenced, to be misunderstood, to be the other.
Or perhaps, most simply, because they are mine. My people. A truth not spoken but felt. Something encoded not in blood or bone, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere no DNA test can reach.

And there is one more truth I carry with me—one that goes beyond politics, beyond place.

We are all hostages.
Not just them.
All of us.

We are trapped in our histories, our biases, our inherited wounds. In our loneliness, our choices, our silent compromises. We wear invisible chains—even when we think we’re free.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s why I think of them.
Because when I see them, I see us.
And when I see us, I want to believe we can be free.
All of us.