Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, the bereaved parents of former hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, spoke about grief, Jewish identity and the value of education in Washington, D.C., on June 8.

Their 23-year-old son, Hersh, was wounded and kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, then killed after 11 months in captivity.

The June 8 event was part of Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School’s annual Rabin Lecture, which aims to strengthen Jewish education and reaffirm core communal ideals, this year in partnership with Washington Hebrew Congregation.

“Currently, they have one of the most powerful voices in our community,” said Adena Kirstein, Milton’s chief growth officer, who helped plan this year’s lecture.

Polin and Goldberg-Polin, who live in Jerusalem, reflected on the past 2 1/2 years since the start of the Israel-Hamas war to an audience of 1,500 attendees.

“To us, we feel that the war that began on the morning after Oct. 7 is still going on,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin said at the event. “We feel very much that things that have happened in these last 2 1/2 years are all part of one very big body of war with different waves.”

The 2026 Rabin Lecture came just a month after the release of Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s book, “When We See You Again.”

“I was writing words for a long time,” she said. “You know that famous philosophical question of if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there, does it make a noise? And I was thinking, ‘If a mother in pain writes in her kitchen, does it move anyone? Do people feel the pain that she’s writing?’”

Weeks after the book’s April publication, Goldberg-Polin said now she knows that the answer is yes.

She spoke to how a strong sense of Jewish identity helps her cope with the grief of losing her son. “It’s so part of who many of us are,” Goldberg-Polin said.

“For me, [my identity] was always a Jew first, and going through life with that saturation always around is helpful and grounding … and I don’t feel adrift,” she added. “Even now in the ‘after,’ when it’s this very scary time of figuring out how do I be in this world without Hersh, what helps is that the second I open my eyes in the morning, I’m saying what many of us say when we wake up: ‘Wow, creator of the universe, you gave me back my soul again. You have tremendous faith in me.’”

Waking up with that gratitude top of mind, Goldberg-Polin said, will set the tone for the rest of the day.

Jon Polin spoke about connecting with Jewish peoplehood since Oct. 7.

“Rachel and I have met more Jews in more places in the world than anybody else in the last three years,” Polin said. “We see what the Jewish people are going through on a global basis, and … of course, there’s no one solution, but I do believe that the single best solution to start to address the problems that we’re all facing … is all of us at all ages need more Jewish education.”

The couple discussed making aliyah from Richmond to Israel when Hersh was 7 years old, their family Shabbat practices and how that custom has changed since losing Hersh, the Jewish values of chesed — kindness — and civil discourse, and the teachers who have left lasting impacts on their lives, including Hersh’s high school principal.

At the end of the night, Kirstein and Milton Head of School Deborah Skolnick-Einhorn presented Goldberg-Polin and Polin with a collection of “blind contour” portraits by Milton students in preschool through sixth grade. The students each drew one another looking only at their subject, making a portrait from one continuous line.

“It was a way to pay tribute to something Rachel and Jon have taught us all, about trying to see people with grace and with hope despite horrible circumstances in the world,” Kirstein said.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com