The Oct. 13 release of the last living Israeli hostages in Gaza brought joy and tears of relief as loved ones were reunited after more than two years apart. It also meant that groups such as Run for Their Lives can now take a step back from their Sunday morning advocacy.
Shany Klein, the founder of the national Run for Their Lives, announced that the global movement would stop its weekly meet-ups.
“There are no more living hostages whose lives we can run for, and as the war has ceased, times may again become uncertain and unsafe,” Klein wrote in an Oct. 13 Facebook post.
Organizers of local chapters across the world are now faced with a decision: whether to continue walking and running until every deceased hostage’s body is returned or seek closure by ending the weekly gatherings.
Jamie Beaulieu, an Arlington resident and organizer of the northern Virginia chapter of Run for Their Lives, said she feels the group has achieved its mission of raising awareness of the hostages.
“We ran for their lives and they came back alive,” Beaulieu said. She added that the NoVa chapter will no longer meet for walks, but will gather one final time to “celebrate the release of the living [hostages] and commemorate our nearly two years of walking and building community together.”
Abbey Frank, a Rockville resident, attended many walks with the Rockville chapter of Run for Their Lives with her elderly parents, starting in January 2024. “It was a very regular part of my Sunday routine for the past two years,” she said.
The last walk she attended was a “cautiously optimistic” gathering the day before all 20 remaining hostages were released. The Sunday afterward, Oct. 19, members of the Rockville chapter met at Cabin John Park to process the events of the past two years and discuss what to do moving forward.
“The consensus was that we were going to follow Run for Their Lives national and have closure on this advocacy and weekly walking and gathering,” Frank said. “But we still have our WhatsApp group, … so we’re going to use [that] as an opportunity to share other events that might be happening to advocate for the return of the [deceased hostages’] bodies.”
The Hostage and Missing Families Forum, meanwhile, will hold weekly vigils on Sundays in Washington until the remaining bodies are returned to the bereaved families.
“Many in the group are still advocating for the release of the 13 hostages, whose remains are still being held captive,” Beaulieu said. “We are just doing that in different ways and outside of what we did with Run for Their Lives.”
Jennifer Udler, the organizer of Run for Their Lives Rockville, also said she feels that the group succeeded in its mission.
“I feel like we did our part in terms of Run For Their Lives, and it was wonderful seeing [the last hostages] uniting with their loved ones,” Udler said.
Though the group came together for a common cause, the walks also strengthened bonds between a handful of people who hadn’t known one another before Run for Their Lives. “We really built a sense of community by being together,” Udler said. “It’s really important these days — everybody’s so scattered or divided, and politics divide people.”
“I have personally made extremely close friends through Run for Their Lives — within northern Virginia, in the DMV more broadly, and around the world with our close leaders’ group,” Beaulieu said. “I will hold onto those relationships as they are the silver lining to a very dark time in our history.”
Udler emphasized that Run for Their Lives was nonpolitical and intentionally not a protest: “We were very peaceful, just walking together in unity.”
At the end of every walk, the group filmed a video of the participants to send to the hostages’ families, reminding them that they weren’t alone.
“It [was] really important to be together during this time, knowing that we had something to do each week and trying to contribute our part,” Udler said. “Just showing up and advocating is important.”
But now it’s time for a new chapter. Frank has amassed a small “wardrobe” of Run for Their Lives shirts and hoodies in the trunk of her car. “It felt weird to take them out of the car and have that closure,” she said.
“It felt good for me to feel like at least I did that little piece,” Frank added of showing up for community walks. “While life gets busy and we’re 6,000 miles away, I was able to connect to that sadness and that advocacy for at least a half hour a week.”
“It’s strange to not gather and walk anymore,” Beaulieu said, adding that the walk had become part of her routine. “I made it a goal to learn about each of the hostages more personally and to share that with the group. It made it more personal for all of us.”
Frank said the Rockville group had “some discussion” about whether halting the weekly walks was the correct thing to do.
“Obviously, I’m listening to the grieving parents who have not received their children’s bodies home, and it’s heartbreaking — they need closure as well,” Frank said. “But I think that this chapter is kind of finished and we will advocate when we can for those bodies [to be] returned.”
That could take an indefinite amount of time, Frank noted, citing Syria’s return of Israeli spy Eli Cohen’s remains 60 years after his death. “I hope with all my soul that this is not what happens to [the hostages’] bodies. But, potentially, that could happen,” Frank said.
“I feel like there is some work to do, but we are not continuing in the same sort of capacity with what we were doing before,” Udler said.
