Not dead but kidnapped: Relatives of Jewish Agency head were taken to Gaza where their fate remains unknown

Twenty years after the Almog family lost five members in the terror attack on the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, tragedy struck once again on Oct. 7 when Hamas overran numerous Jewish towns near the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of Israelis indiscriminately in what is being called the 'Black Shabbat.'

Two days after the brutal Hamas assault, the family of Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, the head of the Jewish Agency since last year, was informed that six of its members were murdered by the terrorists.

Almog’s relative, Varda Goldstein, the family's grandmother, was told by the Israel Defense Forces that her son Nadav and his daughter, Yam (20) were murdered in their home in Kfar Azza.

Nadav’s wife Chen Almog-Goldstein (48) and her children Agam (17), Gal (11), and Tal (9) were identified as missing at first but feared dead.

However, 11 days later, the IDF again contacted Varda and confirmed that Chen, Agam, Gal, and Tal were not murdered, but kidnapped and had been taken to the Gaza Strip as some of the reported 199 hostages.

“We are excited amidst all the sorrow and pain,” Varda told Ynet news. “They are alive and that is what is most important. We pray to see them, only [hope] that they hold out. Thank God they are alive.”

After the first report of his relatives' deaths, Almog told the Israeli website Shavim: “We are facing and continue to face a difficult reality, a cruel injury to the body and soul.”

When asked about how one copes with personal and familial pain, Almog said, “At the moment I am in Nachalat Eran, the rehabilitation village we built in the Negev. I am here at the rehabilitation hospital, seeing the residents of the south who are hospitalized with us.”

“How much love and joy of life we give them. We are living together with them with their very serious wounds. The entire Jewish people is saturated with painful events. You have to get up and recover.”

Almog is the founder of Nachalat Eran, a village that provides residential, medical and social services to the handicapped. The village is named after his son Eran, who died at age 23 after suffering brain damage due to severe autism. He was named after Doron's brother Eran, who fell in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

In 2022, Doron Almog replaced Israel’s now-President Isaac Herzog as head of the Jewish Agency.

Almog had an illustrious military career, in which he served as the commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division and the Southern Command, among others.