The box truck was parked beside a quiet sidewalk in Chicago’s West Loop. A few people stopped, glancing curiously at the image flashing on its rear door: a young man, his expression resolute but tinged with sadness. Below his figure was a message in bold letters: “Chicagoan kidnapped by Hamas.”
“He’s always up there,” said the truck’s driver, Jeremiah Smith, 27, as he stared at the image. “I always know that.”
Twelve hours a day, six days a week, Smith drives the truck through the Chicago area, raising awareness for the scores of Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas. But the man on the screen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, is more than a distant figure.
When Smith was 6 years old, he met Hersh’s grandmother, a tutor at his elementary school, and was taken under her wing. It’s a story of familial love, a bridge of backgrounds — stronger than ever as a war wages on.
“I wouldn’t want nobody else to drive the truck,” Smith said, clutching the Star of David around his neck. “I just want that guy to come home.”
Smith grew up in Cabrini-Green Homes, a public housing complex on Chicago’s Near North Side. His mother didn’t have a high school diploma, and his childhood was marked with violence. He saw his first dead body when he was 6.
“You have to grow up a little bit faster than what you want when you’re living in that situation,” Smith said. “I saw people getting in fights, people getting shot, people selling drugs.”
Smith met Hersh shortly after meeting his grandmother. At the mention of his friend, Smith rattles off a string of anecdotes from their childhood together. The pair’s upbringings were vastly different, but somewhere they found common ground.
“He couldn’t play basketball for nothing,” Smith added. “But that’s what I used to play. I’d have him on the basketball court the whole day. He’s like, ‘Just for you, I’m gonna keep running.’”
He even traveled with the family to Hersh’s bar mitzvah in Israel. Hersh didn’t know how to introduce Smith to their Israeli relatives, so he called him his “brother cousin uncle.”
Hersh, now 23, was kidnapped at the Tribe of Nova music festival in southern Israel during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, in which terrorists killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted about 250 more. Israeli officials say about 80 hostages, including Hersh, are still held captive in Gaza.
Hersh’s family had no idea if he was alive until April 24, when Hamas released a three-minute video of him in captivity. He sat before a bare wall under fluorescent lighting. His hand was missing, his head was shaved. Tears stained his face.
“I saw the video, and I cried because it was like, ‘I’m amazed that he’s alive still,’” Smith said. “I had given up hope.”
Hersh’s parents launched an international campaign, Bring Hersh Home, to raise awareness for the hostage crisis. They met President Joe Biden at the White House at the end of May.
“Do not stop reaching out to elected officials to make sure they are screaming at the top of their lungs,” Hersh’s father told the Tribune in October.
Smith is getting married in August. He’s doing the mother-son dance with both his birth mother and Marcy.
He hopes Hersh will be there too.
Courtesy: Jerusalem Post