Omer Shem Tov is Dancing

How it started, how it's going

I went to Israel in January 2024 to report on the ongoing war and the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. I spoke with the parents of several hostages, including Shelly Shem Tov, mother of Omer, who’d been with friends at the Nova festival. As I wrote here (and for Reason, in “Inside the Hope Machine”):

The last contact Shelly Shemtov had with her youngest son was the morning of October 7. Omer had gone the night before with several friends to the Nova music festival. Shelly and her husband spoke with Omer several times that morning, between the first bombs and 8:45am, when Omer told them he and his friends were trying to escape, they had gotten to the car.

Shelly tracked her son via his phone - he appeared to be getting out. But then, the tracking started to go the wrong direction, toward Gaza.

“I’m saying, no way, it’s a huge wall; maybe someone stole his phone,” she recalls.

There were no more calls, no word until that night, when a friend of Omer’s sent a video he’d seen online.

“We saw that Omer is on the floor of a pick-up truck, with his hands handcuffed,” Shelly says.

That was 103 days ago.

The possibilities of what might be happening to her child, whether she would ever see him again, were devastating to contemplate, if not any portion as terrifying as what Shelly herself was experiencing.

Omer was released on February 22, 2025, having spent 505 days in captivity. His reunion with his parents was captured on video. But it was a video I was sent today, by my dear friend Yael bar Tur - who was in Tel Aviv for her nephew’s bar mitzvah on October 7, 2023 - that made me well up just now on the MetroNorth train. I’ve never had any interest in Burning Man, but this, this is really great. And yes, that’s Shelly dancing with her son.