Doing My G-ddamn Best

To an unfortunate number of aggressively ignorant westerners, "Arab" is a skin color/regional identity like "Black" or "Asian", and Kurds, Copts, Bedouin, Yazidi, Druze, Assyrians, and Persians are all subcategories of Arab. I have literally seen them claim that Sepharadi and Mizrahi Jews who fled to Israel from the MENA region are "Arab Jews" who are misled by Evil European Invaders.

And if you try to explain that Arabs are actually a particular tribe in the Middle East rather than synonymous with the whole of it, and what they are saying is the regional equivalent of claiming all Europeans are subcategories of German and any European who doesn't identify as German is either deceived or really from somewhere other than Europe, they insist that you're lying and propagandizing and cannot be trusted.

Old Jewish Cemetery

Prague, Czechia

In her first long-form interviews more than two years after her release from captivity, freed hostage Rimon Buchshtab-Kirscht shared this week what she told her Hamas captor as she was handed off to Red Cross personnel in Gaza.

Buchshtab-Kirscht was 36 when she was abducted by the Hamas terror group during its October 7, 2023, onslaught, and then returned to Israel as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal that November. Footage showing Buchshtab-Kirscht visibly talking back to the terror operative went viral.

“The whole ride [to the Red Cross hand-off] he was teasing me about Yagev,” she told the Ynet news site, in an interview released on Sunday. She was referring to her husband Yagev Buchshtab, who was kidnapped alongside her from their home in Kibbutz Nirim and then killed in captivity.

“‘Yagev will be here in two days,’” she recalled the terrorist – named Mustafa – saying to her. “‘Yagev will be here four days from now.’ And when he started talking about Yagev, he was pressing all my buttons, and it didn’t sit well with me.”

She added, “And then the terrorists in the car gave me a speech about going out.” She recounted that they told her, in English: “Smile and wave.” She continued: “And when you go out to that audience, who are barking and raging and screaming at you, they start telling you, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”

“At that point, you’re already so hungry and exhausted that nothing moves you or frightens you, and I started cursing him in Arabic, so that everyone would understand. It wasn’t some super special confrontation.

“I just spoke to him the way they deserve, like the sons of bitches they are,” she said.

“I shouted at him, ‘Just because you’re masked doesn’t mean I can’t see you, and just because your eyes are covered doesn’t mean I don’t recognize your voice, or remember what you did to me, and kul kalb biji yomo,” she said. The Arabic expression refers to every “dog” eventually getting what it deserves.

Married her lifelong friend in 2021

In the interview, the now-39 year old from Kibbutz Magen spoke about her lifelong friendship and then courtship with Yagev, whom she met when the two were in elementary school in the Gaza border area.

They became romantically involved in 2020, and married in 2021. They lived together in Nirim, not far from where they grew up, with five dogs and four cats.

She told Ynet that, in captivity, the couple spoke about their plans to have a child together, and recalled that when she quickly stopped getting her period as a result of severe weight loss, they chose to believe instead that she’d conceived before their abduction.

Buchshtab-Kirscht recalled how, at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, the moment the attack began, she and her husband were woken up by rocket sirens at the start of the Hamas invasion.

“The last thing he managed to do before [the terrorists] finally broke in was to look me in the eyes and say: ‘I’m sorry,’ and I immediately went into a speech: ‘Don’t you dare apologize, this isn’t your fault, everything is okay, the important thing is to stay together.’”

“At 8:40, they broke into the house, and they tried to separate us. Our shirts were torn, but we wouldn’t let go of each other, and they couldn’t manage to lift us up, so they dragged us on the sidewalk, and punched us.”

“They put us in a golf cart, where I was sitting on the dead body of a terrorist, and we drove past the kibbutz, and they told us, ‘Start walking.’ We walked a long time in the fields, in pajamas, barefoot.”

Eventually, a white Toyota pulled up, and they were pushed inside it, and given what she called “a tour of Gaza.”

“I covered Yagev’s eyes, so he wouldn’t see the bloodbath outside,” she said. “Among other things, I saw a girl on a motorcycle, tied up by the upper part of her naked body, as the lower part of it was being dragged on the ground.”

The couple was taken to a house in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, the home of a Hamas operative named Osama, who she said was about 60 years old. He had two sons, one in middle school and one in high school, who brought her two kittens, and also gave her some acetaminophen for her injuries, she said. At one point, two other Hamas operatives came and pulled out one of her broken teeth.

“Sinwar spoke with me in English, said ‘Let’s talk'”

At one point, Buchshtab-Kirscht recalled, an “important person” from Hamas was taken to the area where she was being held with five other hostages. She later learned it had been terror chief Yahya Sinwar.

“At the time, I just knew it was a very senior person, who came with a notebook and wanted me to write down the details of the hostages in Hebrew block letters [rather than script], because that’s what he knew how to read, and also in English.”

“He said we’d all be recorded on video, saying our name, our age, where we’re from, and our ID numbers. Sinwar spoke with me in English, and he said I had a head on my shoulders, and ‘Let’s talk,’” she recalled.

“He wanted to know what our conditions were like, how [our captors] were interacting with us, and I said to him: ‘Great that you asked, I have a lot to tell you – but first, I want to ask something of you. Promise me that after I’m done, you will take Yagev and me down to the tunnels and put us with other hostages, because these [captors] treat us very cruelly.”

“And he took my hand and he really stood by it. Afterward, he took us down to the tunnels after we got a cup of hot tea, and Yagev got an inhaler,” she said, adding that she concealed the inhaler in her bra, which she also used to keep drawings given to her by child hostages.

In the tunnels, however, she said she and her husband were still treated poorly. They were kept in a cage and separated from other hostages.

Stabbed captors to protect her husband

Buchshtab-Kirscht told Channel 12 in a separate interview aired Monday evening that she stabbed her captors on multiple occasions, both during her abduction and in captivity.

She said she felt compelled to protect Yagev by any means necessary “even it meant attacking a terrorist” or taking beatings in his place.

“If you need to stab a terrorist, you stab a terrorist,” she said.

She recalled stabbing the first terrorist who entered her home on October 7 with a kitchen knife.

On another occasion, she said she stabbed one of her captors with a fork she had secretly hidden after he entered the room where she and her husband were being held, intending to beat Yagev.

After she stabbed him, the terrorist asked her in English, “You crazy?” Buchshtab-Kirscht replied in Arabic: “No, I’m crazy.”

She added that she refused to read from a script Hamas operatives handed her while filming a hostage propaganda video alongside fellow hostages Danielle Aloni and Lena Trufanov. She said the refusal was met with a brutal beating that left her with broken teeth.

She also opened up about the sexual assault she experienced, which she said she didn’t even realize had taken place until she was asked upon her return whether she had been assaulted.

“I underwent a very intrusive search,” she said. “Only afterward at some point, I realized that, looking at it from the outside, I experienced some sort of sexual crime.”

Begging captors not to separate her from husband

When hostage releases began in late November, during a weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the couple’s captors declared that Rimon would be released without Yagev.

Buchshtab-Kirscht told Ynet that she begged her captors to release a different hostage instead, pleading: ‘I don’t ask for much, not for medicine, not for toilet paper, I’m ready to stay here, with all the fleas, with my broken tooth and my broken face.’ But they insisted it had to be me.”

She said she was consoled by fellow captive Yarden Bibas, who had been separated on October 7 from his wife Shiri and two sons, 4-year-old Ariel and baby Kfir, all three of whom were later revealed to have been murdered in captivity. Yarden, and the bodies of his wife and children, were released in 2025.

When their guards allowed Bibas to speak with her, she recalled, “He said to me, ‘Rimon, if anyone knows what it’s like to be torn away from the one you love in this hell called Gaza, it’s me.”

In July 2024, Israel confirmed that Yagev Buchshtab had been slain in captivity. His body was later recovered by troops from Khan Younis alongside those of Avraham Munder, Nadav Popplewell, Alex Dancyg, Chaim Peri and Yoram Metzger — who were also kidnapped alive and slain in captivity — during a military operation in August 2024.

He was buried in Kibbutz Nirim on August 21, 2024.

‘Where the hell were you?’

When she was handed off for release, she said: “The Red Cross lady ran over to me, with a big smile, and I said to her: ‘Where the hell were you?! We waited for you on October 7, 8, 9.”

“Later, at a meeting in the President’s Residence, that same lady tries to talk to you about uninvolved civilians. And then you show her a scar, and explain that it’s from a four-year-old who threw a brick at you on your way out, because parents take their four-year-old children to throw things at hostages.”

Recalling her words to Meirav Tal, another hostage released together with her, Buchshtab-Kirscht said: “I told her, all the screaming and whistling is because we’re knockouts, gorgeous.”

Ritual handwashing, hamotzi, and wine/grape juice are in smaller print because those are ones that I have memorized.

“Grain Sustenance” refers to anything made from grain (wheat, barley, rye, spelt or oat) that isn’t bread: cake, pastries, pasta, couscous, farfel, most crackers and cereals. I specifically included sustenance (from mezonot) in the title because it’s a helpful reminder for me and others that haven’t had a good relationship with food in the past that yes, these items are absolutely sustanence that you can and should be eating (unless you have an allergy of course).

Fruit of the Trees: something grown from a perennial tree that does not renew its stem and does not grow too close to the ground. Examples: apples, grapes, and nuts (not peanut).

Veggies and Other Fruits: These are the “fruits of the earth” which includes vegetables, legumes, peanuts, and any fruit that doesn’t fit the tree fruit description. Examples of that include bananas, melon, pineapple, and some berries.

Miscellaneous: all other food. Meat, fish, eggs, cheese, mushrooms, candy, water, non-grape drinks, etc.

For more details and rules, check out Jewish Virtual Library. They have tables with more examples, and specifics about when and how to say the blessings.

Happy 100th Birthday to legend and icon Marilyn Monroe. much will be written about her today - about her beauty, her tragedy, her talent, her underrated intellect and that warring with her pinup sex appeal, her passion for acting, her pioneering vision when she founded her own production company, the questions that marred her relationships and her death, the sparkling legacy of her films.

I expect very little, if anything, will be said about her Judaism, but that, too, was a fundamental part of her humanity, her desire for stillness and comfort, her longing to find a home, her unseen depth. her Jewish identity was denied her even at her own funeral by those who circled her life yet never seemed to truly understand her, and I feel the least we can do to honor her, and to uplift her spirit and delicate heart, is to insist that this part of her is recognized.

Two months after I started to date my future husband, I asked him, “Am I more Israeli, Australian or American?”

His answer surprised me: “You’re more Iraqi.”

My parents were born in Iraq but they met and married in Israel, where I was born. My mother’s family moved to Australia in 1967, and my family followed, landing there on my second birthday in 1968.

By the age of 5, I was putting in solid hours as my grandmother’s sous chef in her kitchen in Rose Bay, a suburb of Sydney. While I spoke Hebrew with my father and English with my mother, I spoke a Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic dialect with my Nana Aziza. I was the official interpreter on our shopping expeditions to Bondi Junction. 

When I was 7, my family and I visited Israel. In the kitchen at my uncle’s apartment in Petah Tikva, unbeknownst to me, I was naming the fruits and vegetables in Arabic, prompting hysterical laughter from the Baghdadi-born wives of two of my uncles. I quickly learned that ba’ban jan was cha’tzil (eggplant) and ka’ra was d’la’at (pumpkin or squash).

In Sydney, my grandmother continued to prepare the traditional Iraqi Jewish Shabbat breakfast. Every Friday morning she would peel, slice and brine the deep purple ba’ban jan and put it in the sun to drain for several hours before frying it. She would peel the bright orange ka’ra, then fry it to crispy golden-brown perfection. She would make her t’beet, a slow-cooked Iraqi chicken and rice dish, and place the eggs on top, ready to roast overnight in the oven. She would boil potatoes in their skins and carefully wash tons of Italian parsley and romaine lettuce. 

On Shabbat days when the weather was warm, my entire extended family (my mother comes from a family of eight) would enjoy our Iraqi breakfast al fresco. There were velvety, caramelized brown bethi mel Shabbath: eggs that have cooked overnight, also known in Ladino as huevos haminados; fried eggplant and butternut squash; boiled potatoes, perfectly sliced with a heavy sprinkle of black pepper; and z’lata (salad) of bright red tomatoes, crisp cucumber and earthy parsley, flecked with purple onion and a citrusy dressing. 

My grandmother prided herself on her homemade condiments, loading the table with pungent, deep yellow amba (pickled mango sauce), spicy green Yemenite zhug and turshi, a combination of cauliflower, green beans, carrots, red pepper and garlic pickled in a spicy-sweet, curry and turmeric brine. Not to mention hummus, tahini, fij’il (radishes) and bas’l akhdar (scallions). There were freshly baked large pitas and everyone would happily make their own laffa (Iraqi-style rolled sandwich). 

Legend has it that in the early 1960s, an Iraqi immigrant named Sabich had a little snack stand near the bus depot in Ramat Gan, Israel. The bus drivers ending their shifts asked him to sell ready-made food, so he combined all of the ingredients of the classic Iraqi breakfast in laffa, pillowy sheets of Iraqi flatbread. Sabich remains one of the most popular street foods of Israel. 

Now living in Los Angeles, my family still eats this Iraqi breakfast every Shabbat. I think of my grandmother and her abundant patience to stand for hours and fry everything, and  pray that, as she watches me from Heaven, she forgives me for being lazy. No frying for me — I roast my eggplant and butternut squash in the oven. And my great aunt Tina taught me a great hack for baking the Shabbat eggs: Wrapping the entire cardboard container with a double layer of foil. While I buy my amba from the kosher market or Trader Joe’s, I do pickle my own turshi — just like my Nana Aziza did.