Hundreds of Brits and Israelis flypost London streets with images of Israeli kidnap victims
Following similar events in Berlin, Madrid, New York and Barcelona, organisers visit non-Jewish neighbourhoods, to get the message to non-Jewish residents.
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
Hundreds of volunteers — both Israeli and British Jews — have been taking part in a unique flyposting project to show the faces of the men, women and children abducted by Hamas terrorists on Saturday.
As husband-and-wife Yair and Michal Oshman explained, the idea began in New York and has spread to cities all over the world, from London to Berlin, Amsterdam and Madrid.
More than 200 people, including little children, babies and elderly citizens, were kidnapped and are said to be held as hostages in Gaza.
Each flyer shows the faces of the hostages, identifying them by name and with the single word “Kidnapped”. The volunteers arrive at an agreed location and are given different areas of London to post the hundreds of flyers.
The organisers have divided the city into 45 areas — excluding Jewish neighbourhoods, because the idea is to get the message to non-Jewish Londoners.
And the volunteers have been pleasantly surprised by the response. In one area where dozens of posters were displayed, two police officers went over to the fly-posters. But, rather than ask them to remove the display, the officers spent time examining the pictures and expressing great interest.
Liraz Rubinstein, 37, said: “These are probably the worst days of my life”. He is a member of a Special Forces unit in Israel and most of his colleagues have already been called up or have registered for service. He has not yet decided whether to return to Israel, though at least one man at the flyers collection point, who did not want to give his name, was due to return on Friday.
In a social media post, Rubinstein wrote: “It’s hard to find words to describe what I feel since Saturday.
President Biden in his speech to our nation was the closest to describe it: “It leaves a black hole in your chest when you lose family, feeling like you’re being sucked in. The anger, the pain, the sense of hopelessness.”
He added: “As a parent myself, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have my children kidnapped. It is a parent’s worst nightmare. The thought of my own children being snatched away from me and held hostage is simply unbearable”.
Those Israelis who are not returning to Israel, for work reasons in the UK or if they are not eligible for army service, are doing their best to raise awareness of the plight of the hostages throughout the fly-posting campaign. There will also be posters throughout the Underground, the organisers say.
Eyal Baram, another of the organisers, told Jewish News: “I have lost nine friends in the past few days — one at the Supernova music festival and eight who were in the IDF.” He had been in constant touch with friends in the army and had been told of gruesome scenes in the southern kibbutzim, of “bodies all round the area. One friend has a six-month-old baby and he saw beheaded babies in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri. We have never seen anything on this level since the Holocaust.”
Another friend had told him: “This war will change my life”. Eyal believed that the goal now was to stop Hamas in the same way that the world had destroyed ISIS. “We should do the same”.
All of the volunteers who arrived to collect the posters, and display them as widely as possible, said they were also committed to spreading the story of the hostages on social media in every platform.
Isabel, a British Jew who had been allotted the area of Buckingham Palace in which to put up the posters, told JN that she had been living in Tel Aviv for a year and had been due to return this week to take up a job. “Instead, I’m doing this. And I think it doesn’t matter what your political opinions are, this is something which unites us”.
Two young women, wearing headscarves, were filmed yesterday
(Thursday) rippling down the “kidnapped” fly posters taped up outside Mornington Crescent tube station. A passer-by asked them if they had no compassion for the children who had been killed — to which one of them replied: “What about the Palestinian children?”
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