Have you ever heard of someone having two funerals? Within our current painful and complex chapter of Jewish history, this unheard of reality has become a realty in Israel. This week, Hadar Goldin had his second funeral.
Formally, Israel’s military, Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, concluded on Aug. 26, 2014.Officially, though, it came full circle on Nov. 11, 2025, when after just over 11 years, Lt. Hadar Goldin was brought to his final resting place, and was buried in his home — in Israel — symbolizing the closure of a painfully tortured chapter.
Among the meanings in Hebrew for the word and name Hadar is splendor or augustness. Today, I learned, in Aramaic it means return.
Hadar — splendor-return — finally returned. The splendor of his Jewish heroism has forever entered the annals of Jewish history.
I first encountered Hadar’s dignified parents when they spoke at “Shaleshudos” (the third Sabbath meal) at my shul on Upper West Side of Manhattan. Their battle for their beloved son’s return for proper Jewish burial was relentless.
Both of Hadar’s parents, Simcha and Leah, were there. Their poise and passion — and pain — was palpable. After their formal remarks and cry for the return of their son’s remains from Gaza, many of us who were deeply moved by their words and their plight crowded around them to share our support and say how much we were with them in this agonizing journey they were thrown into.
I don’t remember the exact date, but it was probably within a couple of years after Operation Protective Edge. Certainly, long before Oct. 7, 2023.
In the intervening years, across the screen, I had seen the Goldins’ cry of pain, in vain, in the Knesset. I followed their journey and continued to pray, but I hadn’t encountered the family in person again.
Then, this past January, I think it was the first time that, along with live hostages kidnapped by Hamas, dead hostages were returned, too.
Even without being personally connected, on a national level it was a profoundly bittersweet and complex moment for Israelis. Navigating both the relief of the good news, the joyous return of live hostages reuniting with their families, and the simultaneous grief for the families whose loved ones came back in body bags. It was too much to bear.
With their deep sensitivity to the grief and complexity of this emotionally sensitive moment, Zvi and Sarit Zussman whose heroic son had fallen in Gaza fighting to protect Israel, organized an evening titled “Chesed shel Emet, Unconditional Kindness,” after the concept of the unrequited kindness in bringing a Jewish person to a Jewish burial. It’s kindness that can never be repaid.
The tone of the evening was set by the wall-to-wall mezuzzahs that graced the walls of Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue and by the muted guitar strumming set to soft soulful singing. The speakers’ roles in the war related to the proper burial of fallen soldiers, the painful topic of Jewish burial of the fallen in wartime.
One of the speakers was Hadar’s father, Simcha Goldin. By 2025, it had been years since Hadar was murdered by Hamas. It was not like long ago when I had heard him speak in Manhattan, when the return of his son’s remains seemed attainable.
Now it was over 10 years since Hadar was gone and still in Gaza. And now, heartbreakingly, many other kidnapped Jews lay dead in Gaza.
First, Hadar’s father began by reading from Hadar’s own stirring and inspirational words about kindness, taken from Hadar’s own learned and insightful commentary on Mesillat Yesharim that, remarkably, he had published as a youth.
I don’t remember exactly what Simcha Goldin went on to say. It was from the book of Samuel , I believe. Perhaps it related to the return of the dead bodies of King Saul and of his son Jonathan — I’m really not sure. But the study was imbued with the primal scream of a father of a fallen soldier whose son had fallen in battle protecting the Jewish people, who was captured, and who had still not returned back home for burial!
Whatever it was that Hadar’s father was saying, I listened to his words through my own tears.
Hadar’s father then continued with an insight about the crucial responsibility of retrieving fallen soldiers for burial, or else a catastrophe can befall the Jewish people. Apparently this was his anthem for years, a cry that he cried out from his own pain — and a warning to the Jewish people, long before Oct. 7, 2023.
Whatever it was he said that night, I remember it moved me to feel like I wanted to personally rise up and go to Gaza and bring Hadar to burial. Something surged and coursed within me about the pain and the injustice of Hadar’s fate like never before.
When Jacob is informed of the loss of his son Joseph, Jacob was inconsolable, even years and years afterward. There was something in him that couldn’t reconcile with his son’s death. Perhaps it was a hope or an intuition that Joseph was in fact not dead, but still alive.
But Jacob was also crippled by the pain of not having closed this tragedy with a proper, tangible Jewish burial place for his son; a sacred value in our tradition.
Many of us saw our grandparents carry this haunting pain around their whole lives. Their relatives who were burned in the crematoria with no proper, dignified burial, no mark in this world, no returning to the world’s first womb, Mother earth.
This life of being held in agonizing abeyance, knowing that Hadar’s remains were left in the power of monsters to do with him what they pleased, was utterly debilitating. Even so, unwavering, faithful, undimmed for 11 years, staying the painful course, praying, advocating for their son’s proper Jewish burial in his land, was the feat of loving, devoted parenting, with great dignity, bravery and graciousness. This is what we have all been witness to.
Watching the Goldins and other families beg for the return of their dead loved ones for the basic dignity of burial is brutal. The worst has already befallen them. But at the very least, they should at least be able to bury them.
For Hadar’s family and friends — his fiancee, too, this is a moment of coming full circle.
Of finally doing what is right. Of repairing a wrong. Of declaring: No IDF soldier fighting to protect Israel should ever be left behind, when there were ways to bring them back.
This has been an unhealed wound, festering.
Whether expressed or not, at some point, inevitably, fears begin to percolate that Hadar’s fate will turn out to be unresolved, like the fate of Seargent First Class Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman, Ron Arad and Zachary Baumel. Baumel was finally brought to burial after 37 years, in 2019, but the others — still not. Katz, Feldman, Arad, Baumel — names that everyone of my Israeli generation knows — and are haunted by. Yet, also at some point names that are all but forgotten, names that disappear from the radar of society, relegated to the tragic unresolved distant past. Yet persistently, if even subconsciously, they hover and haunt.
I still remember that erev Shabbat news on the final day of Operation Protective Edge when, after 50 days, a ceasefire had been reached, and the new name, Hadar Goldin, came to be known. The news was confusing. Was he dead? Was he alive? Was he captured?
By the end of that Shabbat, we learned, he wasn’t alive. And he was captured. And he had bravely entered one of those cursed Hamas tunnels. And one of his Givati brothers-in arms, Lt. Eitan Fund, had selflessly risked his life to enter the tunnel where Hadar was captured to to try and recover enough of his remains so as at least to confirm his death and not leave his fate unknown.
The IDF had completed its military mission in Gaza and left Gaza — but with the remains of Hadar Goldin left behind. It was a terrible, unsettling, unresolved feeling of abandonment. His body was held captive by Hamas.
Never to abandon a brother-in-arms is an unspoken pact of Israeli society.
Areivut .
Interconnetedness of all of Am Yisrael.
Hadar’s unresolved fate hung over Israel.
But today, this harrowing saga came to an end.
A deeply sad end, as the Goldin family and the entire Israel, including thousands of whom came in person to pay their last respects and to part from Hadar whom they had come to feel they knew, and in whom they felt such pride, as his long, winding and wrenching chapter came to an end.
At Hadar’s second funeral. His final burial.
When Hadar’s coffin arrived in Israel, his comrades from his Givati unit with whom he had fought side by side in that fateful battle received him back at the border. They formally encircled his coffin, saluting him.
The first cadences of Kaddish murmured for Hadar were right there, by his fellow soldiers.
In its own way, their unit was now complete once again.
Hadar was back, even if not alive, but buried in Israel. Nestled within his people and his land that he fought for and ultimately sacrificed his life for.
The final end of Operation Protective Edge came today, more than 11 years after Aug. 26, 2014.
For the Goldins, even as their lifetime of mourning now formally begins, this closing has hopefully brought a rest of sorts to their wearied and brave souls.
Their mission is now over.
Their cry was finally heeded.
We continue to pray for the four families still awaiting the return of their own hostage, their loved one’s return from the clutches of evil, to be buried by their families, in Israel.
© IJN 2025
