Fifteen-year-old Tuval Ben-Yohana got upset when people would express doubts that any of the 101 hostages left in Gaza are still alive. That frustration gave him an idea: to start a website where anyone can write letters to the hostages to be distributed to them upon their return to Israel. “I think of them as being alive,” Tuval, who uses both “he” and “they” pronouns, told Davar. “I want people to write with the intention that the hostages will read it, that they’re alive and they’ll read it one day. Letters that will bring hope.”
A counselor in the scouts movement and a volunteer for Magen David Adom, Tuval has experience doing good for their community. Since the war broke out, he’s volunteered packing boxes of food for soldiers and for displaced Israelis. That same spirit of social activism inspired them to launch the website Letters of Hope. In the few days since the website launched, more than 600 people have written letters to the hostages.
Tuval sees Letters for Hope as something benefiting the Israeli public as well as the hostages. “When you write a letter, you feel connected, and as someone without a personal connection to someone held hostage, it becomes significant,” they explained. “When I write to someone I don’t know, there’s a kind of trust, a mutual agreement that there’s no filters here. Everything is real and true, because there’s no reason to hide something from this person.”
The project has three many goals. “The first goal of the website is to keep this issue present in the discourse,” Tuval said. “The second is to create a personal connection with the hostage you’re writing to. You see posters and names in the street, but not everyone sees the person behind the name and the picture.”
The third goal is to communicate to the hostages that the Israeli public cared about them and wanted to bring them home. “A hostage who comes home will receive a bag of letters from people he doesn’t know, and it will reinforce to him how much he was missed and how much people wanted him to come home,” Tuval said. “It seems obvious, but they don’t know, and they’re not familiar with the struggle. It will give them proof that they’re important.”
He chose to design the website so that he himself doesn’t have access to the letters—they’re meant only for the hostages. Friends and family involved in the project raised concerns that some people might upload inappropriate letters, so Tuval agreed to have volunteers read over the letters before they’re sent out.
The website suggests several possible ways to open a letter, recognizing how difficult it is to write to someone who’s been held hostage for more than a year. Suggestions for starting a letter include “Many people are thinking of you and hoping for your release and for your safe return home,” and “I can only imagine the hardships you’re going through, but I wanted to let you know…”
Tuval has been working on coding the website for the past 10 months. “Because of the concept of the website, you can only write to hostages who are alive. Since I’ve been working on it for ten months already, there were periods when every week I would need to take down hostages because they were no longer alive,” they explained. “For me, this had a different significance—I didn’t just hear that another hostage was murdered, I had to go into the site and take his profile down, and that was it, you couldn’t write him any more letters.”
To counteract a growing sense of indifference toward and normalization of the hostage situation, Tuval’s project turns the crisis into something intimate and personal. “The clear majority of youths have moved on,” Tuval said. “A friend of mine, who isn’t always involved, went onto the website once it was published and wrote a letter. He chose a hostage who had the same name as him. It caught his eye, and he started writing to him. He showed me afterward what he wrote, about how it’s close to all of us, because any one of us could be there. He still talks to me about it.”
Tuval chose to write to Omer Shem-Tov, a 22-year-old who was taken hostage at the Nova music festival. “I wrote to him one Saturday after getting back from the rally at Hostages Square a few months ago, when the site was still in process,” they said. “There, I heard his family talking about him. I sat across from the computer and told Omer what I heard about him and I joined the prayer of his family that he will return as soon as possible.”
“When they return, they’ll get the letters and see that strangers were thinking about them,” Tuval said. “On the first day they’ll be busy with other things, but after a few weeks they’ll open the bag of letters and that will warm their hearts.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
