His mother, Shelly, pointed out that she had begun doing the same exactly one year before her son was freed.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Omer Shem Tov, one of the six hostages freed on Saturday, began observing the Sabbath while alone in Hamas captivity, his mother said Sunday.
His childhood friend, Itay Regev, who, together with his sister Maya, were with him before being freed in the first hostage deal seven weeks into the war, had spoken out before about how “one of the things we all missed the most was the Kiddush Friday night,” a benediction said over wine or grape juice at the start of the Sabbath meal.
“Since he was a small boy, Omer was the one who said the kiddush,” his mother, Shelly, recalled.
“One day, they received a small bottle of grape juice and some salted pretzels,” she said. “They took the salt off the pretzels” and saved it all carefully.
“Every Friday night they took a piece of toilet paper and put it on their heads as a kipah, and Omer said Kiddush,” she continued. They would pretend that a few pretzels were the challah bread eaten at the start of the meal, and Omer would salt them, as is traditionally done, and say the blessing.
As other hostages have also mentioned to their loved ones upon release, Omer’s faith in God grew stronger when he was in the terrorists’ hands, Shelly said.
She, too, began observing the Sabbath, she said, after joining a weekend run by the group Kesher Yehudi (Jewish Connection), when dozens of hostage families observed the holy day the Orthodox way together with religious families.
“It was a Shabbat that I will never forget – the first Shabbat in my life that I observed according to its rules,” she recalled on Friday as she looked forward to seeing her son. “The connection between the families of the kidnapped and the ultra-Orthodox families who surrounded us was amazing. We hugged, prayed, sang, and spent a holy Shabbat.”
Shelly marveled at the timing of her son’s release, exactly one year later.
“There is no coincidence in the world; everything from Him is blessed, and everyone is a messenger,” she wrote, adding that since then, “More than I kept Shabbat, Shabbat kept me, and by God’s grace, on this Shabbat I will get to hug my Omer, exactly one year later, and it’s amazing how precise everything is.”
Omer was the hostage ordered by a Hamas photographer for propaganda purposes to kiss a terrorist on the forehead while standing on the stage for the handover ceremony to the Red Cross, as if in thanks for good treatment received as a prisoner.
While certain Arab networks seized that footage to “prove” how humane the terrorists were, Omer was in fact treated horrifically.
“For 450 days, Omer was held alone in a tunnel in difficult conditions that included starvation and psychological torture part of the time,” Shelly said Sunday evening at a press conference.
He was not given any medication for his colitis either, she noted.
This was the medical condition that had made him eligible to be released as a “humanitarian case” during this first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
“Omer shared that all he dreamed of doing when he returned home was to put his head on my lap, and for me to comb his hair, and go out riding with [his father] on the motorcycle and feel the spirit of freedom,” she said.
“When he crossed the border… the first face he met was that of a psychologist who introduced herself by name, and the first thing he asked for was her permission to give her a hug because he was thirsty for human touch, warmth, and love,” she added.
