Iris Haim could choose to say that her 28-year-old son Yotam, taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, was killed by mistake when Israeli soldiers mistook him for a terrorist last December.
Or, as she told a rapt audience of several hundred in San Mateo Wednesday night, she could choose to describe him as a hero who chose the way he would die — not by the hands of his Hamas captors, but in freedom.
“I’m a positive person,” she said. “It’s very hard after Oct. 7 to see anything good. So much evil happened to us. We need to believe there is good.”
Haim, 58, who until Oct. 7 lived with her family near the Gaza border, is well-known in Israel today because of a message she sent to the soldiers who killed her son and his two fellow hostages, who were shouting in Hebrew to be rescued. She’d learned the young soldiers were in despair afterward, wracked with guilt about what they’d done. In her message, she told the soldiers that she loved them, she didn’t blame them, and no one in the family was angry at them.
Then she invited them to come visit her and her husband. And they did.
“We talked, we hugged them,” she told the crowd at Chabad of the North Peninsula. “I only asked them one question: How could you think he was Hamas? Didn’t you see his gingy [reddish-blond] hair?” No, the soldiers told her; the hostages’ heads had been shaved.
Haim stood on the bimah in San Mateo as photos and videos of her son were projected on a large screen behind her. Yotam wasn’t an easy person, she said. Born with Hirschsprung’s disease, a grave intestinal condition, he suffered from anxiety, depression and eating disorders. He was rejected for military service, which “made him feel like a zero,” she said. But he was also athletic, intelligent, sardonic and a talented musician, a drummer in a heavy metal band.
“He had 32 tattoos, mostly of animals,” she related. One in particular intrigued her: It was a period followed by a comma. After his death, she found out it was a popular tattoo among young people with depression: The period represented death, and the comma following it meant they had decided to live.
Living on Kibbutz Kfar Aza and working in agriculture to help his father, Yotam was scheduled to perform with his band in Tel Aviv the night of Oct. 7. Instead, he was one of 17 kibbutz residents abducted by Hamas terrorists who infiltrated early that morning; more than 50 of the 400 residents were murdered. He texted and sent videos to his family as the terrorists moved through the kibbutz; his last text came at 10:44 a.m. It read, “I’m afraid to go out, everything is burning.”
Haim couldn’t make sense of his kidnapping. She decided to believe he was alive. “I made my own reality, it kept me sane,” she said. “We are not religious people, but we prayed. We didn’t have prayerbooks. There is no instruction for a mother whose son is kidnapped.”
Later in October she made her first TV appearance, one of many family members of hostages who spoke in public. But unlike those who blamed the government or the military for not doing enough to rescue their loved ones, for making mistakes, “I just talked about Yotam. I said, I believe in all my heart he will come home. I thanked everyone. And a very big thanks I gave to the mothers of soldiers, whose sons are fighting in Gaza to free the hostages. How can we say they’re not doing enough?”
Haim was inspired, she said, by the unity she felt in Israel after Oct. 7, the way people came together to support each other. A self-described leftist and a secularist, she was invited after her TV appearance to speak at a prayer service for the hostages at a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem. After that, she made her first visit to Gush Etzion, a religious settlement in the West Bank.
“I never would have gone there before,” she told the crowd. “Why would I go there, it’s just religious people? But my heart was opened since Oct. 7 to people I never thought I’d be in contact with.”
On Dec. 15, she got the terrible news that Yotam had been shot and killed in error by IDF soldiers.
“For 48 hours, all I could say was, Why? Why did this happen to us?” The day before Yotam’s Dec. 18 funeral, she and her husband met with a therapist. In that session, she began to see her son not as a victim, but as a powerful person who chose his own fate.
“He said, maybe I won’t live, but I refuse to be murdered by them, I prefer to die in freedom,” she told the crowd, imagining what Yotam might have told himself.
He and the two other hostages, also young men, had managed to escape from Hamas — no easy thing, she said — and had five days of freedom before they died.
“He was able to choose his end. I don’t say he was accidentally killed by the army. That’s not the issue. He died in the way he chose. He escaped from Hamas. That’s what we want people to remember. And I started to see the light again.”
Today, Iris Haim continues her travels around the world, speaking about her son and about Jewish unity, about forgiveness and finding the light in the world’s darkness.
“His story could be told differently,” she said. “I choose to tell it in a positive way. I find great meaning in speaking about him, trying to contribute a little bit to the unity I see in Israel. I want others in Israel to open their hearts and see their brothers like themselves.”
On Yotam’s gravestone is inscribed, in Hebrew, “a sensitive soul and a brave heart,” and then a quote from Megadeath, one of his favorite metal bands.