Joel Ceausu is now the full-time Quebec correspondent for The Canadian Jewish News, who can be reached at [email protected].
Batya Mansour can’t remember what she spoke about with her father Shlomo on Oct. 5, 2023, at his home in Kibbutz Kissufim.
“We were going to see him again in a few days. It was a regular visit. My daughter came back from New York,” she told The CJN, “and we were supposed to meet all the family Saturday.”
That didn’t happen. Instead, on that fateful Saturday, Hamas terrorists stormed across the border to commit their slaughter of some 1,200 people, and kidnapping of about 250 others, including her then-85-year-old father.
To date, there has been no word of Shlomo’s location, condition, or predicament.
“His smile reaches his eyes,” Batya Mansour told more than 100 ‘Bring Them Home’ marchers in Montreal, who gathered Oct. 13 as they do each Sunday, anchored by a ‘Run for Their Lives’ event to remember and remind the world about the hostages.
Now known worldwide by the ubiquitous image of his smiling face and his characteristic white mustache, Mansour has lived through two tragically historic moments of Jewish bloodletting in the Middle East’s violent history.
Indeed, one Montreal march organizer, Aviva Aspler Drazin, described him as “a joyful, smiling man who suffered enough in his lifetime.” Having his family join the walk was a moving experience she said.
“We hope that our ability to actually embrace them in person with the love and strength we’ve been sending virtually all these months, will be wind beneath their wings as they navigate this unimaginable time of uncertainty.”
As a three-year-old child in Baghdad, Shlomo Mansour survived the June 1941 farhud(pogrom) which saw Muslim rioters murder hundreds of Jews and injure thousands more. The looting and destruction of homes and businesses over two grisly days was carried out with the help of local authorities spurred on by Nazi-allied leadership.
Coming from a centuries-old community which then numbered some 90,000 Baghdadi Jews (equal to Montreal’s current Jewish population), the young Mansour made aliyah at 13, moving to Kissufim at 16, where he has lived for 70 years, except for the last 12 months while being held in Gaza.
Some 82 years after the bloody rampage in Baghdad, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists came into his kibbutz, murdering 16 people including six Thai workers, and grabbing Shlomo and Mazal, his wife of 60 years who managed to escape and run to a neighbour’s safe room. It was the last time anyone saw Mansour, known as the gentle and friendly craftsman of Kissufim who built toys for children and managed the chicken coop. The oldest hostage taken during the Oct. 7 rampage, he was dragged violently into his car in his pyjamas and taken to Gaza.
His daughter Batya read from his diary, where he recalls the sights and sounds he remembers from those days he was a little child: How men broke into his home, “beat his parents and killed his dog,” and for years he has suffered nightmares remembering the horrific scene of a woman crying out, begging to get back her baby, “but they kept playing with the baby like a ball. They took a knife, stabbed the baby and handed him to her.”
Shlomo Mansour has carried these memories with him said Batya, “and the whole world kept silent. Yes, unfortunately it sounds very familiar. On Oct. 7, all these horrors happened again. We said then ‘Never Again’ especially because we live in our own state, Israel. We never imagined that it would happen again.
“It’s been more than a year our dad is not with us. For (380) days, our family’s life just stopped. We can’t stop worrying. The world must know that what we experienced in Israel can be everywhere tomorrow.
“Since Oct. 7, we have had no information about our father. We don’t know whether he’s alive or not, no evidence has been found. The last person that we know who saw him is my mother who watched the terrorists force him into the backseat of his own car… We hope he’s not starving and that he gets what’s necessary to survive. We live in uncertainty, and it’s killing us. It’s an unbearable situation.”
The eldest of five siblings, Shlomo has five children and 12 grandchildren ranging in age from 2 to 29. “Heis a wonderful husband, an amazing father and grandfather,” she said, reminding all present that Shlomo was a lover of ice cream. Most in the room recalling that on his 86th birthday—March 17—Jews around the world went for ice cream with friends and families, remembering Shlomo and pledging to work to get him home.
As the kibbutz handyman, Mansour would repair toys and jewelry, tend to the chickens and was very dear to the community, and especially so to his own 20-year-old grandson Sagiv, who told The CJN he has one particularly wonderful memory of building a wooden SpongeBob SquarePants doll with his saba (grandfather). Sagiv’s eyes well up when speaking of how much he misses hugging him.
Batya says the sight of people around the world hoisting her father’s image high in the air, in crowds, and on marches helps. “It’s warm. It’s good for us to know that people care, and it’s like you’re giving us a hug” she told The CJN, before making a plea to the world which she’s repeated at every turn: “To humbly ask for any help possible, any contact with politicians, leaders, security agencies who can help us bring my father and the other hostages back. To help us by sharing our dad’s story with anyone. Don’t let the world forget about him and the other hostages.”
Sagiv Mansour doesn’t remember exactly the last time he saw his grandfather, but “it feels like a long time, a long time.”
A personal trainer now living in Kiryat Gat, he proudly told The CJN how he took care of his grandfather. “I would cut his hair and do anything he needed” he says with a wide smile. But did he tend to Shlomo’s now-famous white mustache? “No, no,” laughs Sagiv. “I didn’t touch that.”
He would see his grandparents every week and when asked what he thinks his grandfather is saying to him right now, Sagiv doesn’t hesitate: “He says ‘I’m okay and I miss you. I love you’.”
When asked about efforts around the world and particularly as a young person seeing his grandfather’s image all over social media, he says “Yes, it’s crazy. And it really makes me feel hope and strong, that we’re not alone, that we’re connected with this. I love the encouragement.”
