Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Yuval Shoham were childhood friends, having grown up together in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood, where both their families were involved in the egalitarian prayer community Hakhel.
When Hersh, a 23-year-old American-Israeli, was taken hostage from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, Yuval was among the soldiers tasked with finding him, shouting “Hersh” as he patrolled the Gaza Strip. When Goldberg-Polin’s family announced Hersh’s death over the summer, Yuval’s mother, Oshrat Shoham, spoke of her family and their community’s pain.
“It really feels like he’s our son,” Oshrat said at the time. “The whole neighborhood is here with Hersh signs. We didn’t think it would end like this. Everyone was hoping that we would meet in the joy of liberation and not in this end. We didn’t imagine such an end.”
On Sunday, the unimaginable befell the Shoham family, when the Israeli military announced that Yuval Shoham was killed in an operational accident in Jabalia, a city in northern Gaza. Shoham, 22, was serving as a staff sergeant in the 9th Battalion in the 401st Brigade.
Staff Sergeant Yuval Shoham, 22, from Jerusalem, died Dec. 29, 2024 in the northern Gaza Strip. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
Thousands attended his funeral Monday at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem’s vast military cemetery, after lining the streets leading from their Baka home. In his eulogy, Yuval’s father Ephraim, an associate professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas and bring home those still being held hostage.
“I call on the prime minister — it’s no secret that we don’t see eye to eye, but here over my son’s fresh grave I demand of you in his name and in the name of so many others: Make a deal,” said Ephraim. “Our loved ones are fighting in Gaza so that the kidnapped will return. And to you, my beloved Yuval, I promise that we will walk the path we walked in the light. Your personal candle has unfortunately gone out, but your light will last forever.”
Yuval Shoham was at least the ninth graduate of Himmelfarb High School, a religious public high school in Jerusalem, to die in the war. “The concept of bringing back the hostages was in his heart,” his brother, Shahar Shoham, told Ynet. “He knew Hersh Goldberg-Polin personally and the fact that he was there [in Gaza] connected him even more. He went around Gaza looking for him and shouting ‘Hersh.’”
Shoham’s parents, like Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Hersh’s parents, have publicly articulated the pain and frustration of Israelis who have supported the aims of Israel’s war on Hamas but also seek a negotiated solution to end the fighting and return the hostages. Oshrat Shoham, a lawyer in the Jerusalem district attorney’s office, articulated that pain in a sermon she delivered at Hakhel on Yom Kippur this past October.
“Many, many will not come home anymore. Our beloved Hersh also did not return home. Our dead lie before us. Many graves were dug,” Yuval’s mother said in the sermon. “Orphans, widows, bereaved parents and siblings. Homes destroyed. Many cannot return to their charred, bullet-ridden homes, and are evacuated far from their homes. And our brothers and sisters are kidnapped and languishing in captivity.”
She did not deny the brutal costs of the war, but she also sounded a note of hope.
“We will never, ever be as we were before, and we cannot put the brokenness and disaster behind us,” she said. “But it is our duty to find on this Yom Kippur — alongside the broken heart, a new spirit of restoration.”
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