Yellow ribbon pins were unclipped from lapels, dog tags were taken off necks, magnets were removed from cars and posters taken down from walls. After 843 days in captivity, the remains of Ran Gvili were returned to Israel for burial. Gvili, a police officer killed while defending a Gaza border kibbutz during the Oct. 7 terror attacks, was not only the last remaining hostage from the 2023 Hamas onslaught. His return also marks the first time that there have been no Israeli hostages in Gaza since 2014. 

For the past 843 days, the issue of the hostages — and the advocacy movement that launched to advance the cause — has dominated Jewish discourse not only in Israel but globally. Though the chapter officially came to a close yesterday, its influence on Jewish life will surely remain for years to come.

As seen with the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, in addition to its stated purpose, such movements and causes offer the entryways and platforms that create leaders. In Israel, Natan Sharansky — perhaps the best-known refusenik — became a member of Knesset and government minister before leading the Jewish Agency for Israel as its executive chair, and Yuli Edelstein, who was imprisoned by the Soviet Union for teaching Hebrew, also entered Israeli politics, serving as a Knesset member, minister and — until 2020 — as speaker of the Knesset. 

In his memoir, which was released today, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro details how his family’s involvement in the free Soviet Jewry movement paved the way for his entry into politics.

Shapiro recalls his connection to a Georgian Jewish boy named Avi Goldstein, forged through a pen-pal program that connected American Jews with peers in the Soviet Union. That relationship developed into a national organization called “Children for Avi,” which lobbied American politicians to pressure the Soviet Union to allow the Goldstein family to emigrate. “Five weeks before my Bar Mitzvah, Soviet authorities agreed,” Shapiro writes. So as he read from the Torah in suburban Philadelphia a little over a month later, Avi stood beside him.

“The story got coverage in local news, and I started traveling around the country to give speeches for different organizations about our advocacy. I got a feel for speaking in public and figured out pretty early on that I liked engaging with people,” Shapiro writes.

In Israel, several of the relatives of hostages, who led advocacy campaigns on their behalf at home and abroad, have already indicated an interest in entering politics. Many others, as well as many freed hostages, have begun speaking widely in public fora and otherwise started entering civil society. 

As has been discussed in these pages before, the campaign to secure the release of the hostages served as a catalyst for Israeli expats in the U.S. to get more deeply involved in their local Jewish communities as they organized rallies and lobbied local politicians. Even without the cause of the hostages, that connection is unlikely to disappear quickly.

Like the free Soviet Jewry movement, the campaign to secure the release of the hostages was embraced by nearly all of the Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative. Though there were at times fierce differences of opinion over how best to secure the hostages’ release — military action or diplomatic negotiations — the issue united the Jewish community at a time of increasing polarization and division. 

Both also had simple, four-word slogans: “Let my people go” for Soviet Jewry and “Bring them home now” for the hostages. But the subjects of those sentences also reflect a key difference between the two campaigns: The free Soviet Jewry movement’s motto was a cry to a brutal non-Jewish government to act; the hostage movement’s was a demand primarily of Israel’s Jewish leaders. 

Writing in 2004, marking 40 years since the start of the free Soviet Jewry movement, Yossi Klein Halevi noted that the campaign empowered American Jews, giving them a central role to play in a major global Jewish event.

“American Jews came to see themselves as a major force for Jewish freedom and security, protecting endangered Jews through political means, just as Israel did through military means,” Halevi wrote. “In its struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jews, American Jewry liberated itself as well.”

And now we will see what the struggle for the freedom of the hostages will do.