Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance.
All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — “May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.”
He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza.
Mr. Shem Tov was 20 when gunmen seized him during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel. He had grown up in a largely secular home, and was living a relatively carefree existence after completing his compulsory military service — waiting tables in a steakhouse to earn money for a post-army trip to South America, a popular rite of passage for many Israelis of his age.
He was captured while fleeing the Nova music festival, a rave party attended by thousands near the Gaza border.
A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.
“You are looking for something to lean on, to hold onto,” Mr. Shem Tov said in a recent interview at his family home in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. “The first place I went to was God. I would feel a power enter me,” he said.
“Faith kept me going,” he said, adding, “I always believed I would get home, though I didn’t know how or when.”
He was eventually released in late February as part of a temporary cease-fire deal after 505 days in Gaza.
Mr. Shem Tov, who turned 22 in captivity, said he had always had faith, but had never been religiously observant.
Many other released hostages have spoken of similar experiences, finding solace and the strength to survive by connecting or reconnecting with God and recalling oft-forgotten Jewish rituals.
Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation about having purpose in life, from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: “He who has a why can bear with any how.”
Among those hostages is Eli Sharabi, who emerged emaciated after 491 days in captivity to learn that his wife and two teenage daughters had been killed in the October 2023 attack. He recounted how he had recited the Shema Yisrael, a central Jewish prayer, daily in the dark, dank tunnel space he shared with other hostages, and had tried every Sabbath eve to make kiddush, the blessing over wine, though they only had water.
Mr. Sharabi told how Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s adage inspired and sustained him after the pair spent a few days in a tunnel together. Another hostage, Or Levy, who was later held and ultimately released with Mr. Sharabi, even had the maxim tattooed on his arm after his return home.
And like several other family members of hostages, Mr. Shem Tov’s mother, Shelly, experienced her own spiritual journey while her son was in Gaza. She too began observing the rules of the Sabbath. She came by Psalm 20 randomly: A group supporting hostages’ families handed out cards printed with chapters from the Book of Psalms, and that psalm happened to be the one that had Omer’s name on it.
For 27 days in early 2024, while Mr. Shem Tov was in a Hamas tunnel, he could hear Israeli troops above him. After they moved on, he said that his captors brought him some reading materials the soldiers had left behind, including some religious literature that Mr. Shem Tov’s captors asked him to decode, thinking they might be military instructions.
Call it coincidence, but among the materials, which the captors allowed him to keep, was a card printed with Psalm 20 — though without his name on it.
The Capture
On Oct. 7, Mr. Shem Tov fled from gunmen through a furrowed field near the festival site with his good friend Maya Regev and her brother, Itai Regev, who was then 18.
Ori Danino, another member of their party whom they had only met a few hours before the festival, had managed to drive out of the danger zone. But he called them, asked them to send him their location and came back to get them.
Back on the road gunmen shot up their car, wounding the Regevs. All four were abducted to Gaza. Mr. Danino was taken separately. He and five other hostages — among them Mr. Goldberg-Polin — were shot to death by their captors, the Israeli military said, in a squalid tunnel in southern Gaza last year in August.
Mr. Shem Tov said that as soon as he arrived in Gaza he was lowered into the ground in a plastic tub, by a winch. His first instinct was to try to connect with his captors, he said, by introducing himself and asking their names. One asked if he knew the songs of Eden Ben Zaken, an Israeli pop singer. He sang the chorus of “Queen of Roses,” one of her hits.
He said he was forced to walk through the tunnels and came up into a house with yellow couches and a chandelier. From there he was driven to the first apartment where he would be held and was soon joined there by the Regevs, who had received some rudimentary treatment for their wounds. Maya Regev was later transferred to a Palestinian hospital and the siblings were released along with scores of other hostages during a brief cease-fire in Nov. 2023.
Mr. Shem Tov said he was moved several times, usually at night and once dressed as a veiled Muslim woman. He said he and Mr. Regev narrowly missed being hit by Israeli airstrikes, including one that shattered the windows of their room and filled it with thick black dust.
A week after being captured, Mr. Shem Tov said, he decided to keep kosher as much as he could, eating either the cheese or the canned meat when they were given both, in line with Jewish dietary laws that prohibit mixing meat and dairy products. He promised God that if he got home, he would pray daily with “tefillin” — the small leather boxes containing scriptures that worshipers tie onto their heads and left arms for morning prayers.
He said that the first miracle was that he had survived the initial ambush unscathed. A photo of the blue car showed the windshield on the passenger side, where he had been sitting, shattered by bullets. “Even as I look at it now, I’m shocked that I got out alive,” he said.
After the November 2023 cease-fire collapsed, Mr. Shem Tov was taken back down into the tunnels and spent the rest of his captivity alone, save for the gunmen who would look in on him.
In Hamas’s Underworld
For 50 days, he said, he sat in a small, stifling cell with hardly any food — as little as one biscuit a day and a few drops of salty water. It was pitch dark most of the time. An asthma sufferer, he could barely breath. His captors brought him an inhaler. One day, at breaking point, he begged God to take him somewhere — anywhere — else.
Ten minutes later, he said, the captors came and moved him to a larger underground chamber with white tiled walls and electricity.
“It was paradise” by comparison, he said.
Two days later, his captors told him they were taking him back to the previous cell, which distressed him. But he said that the Israeli military struck part of the tunnel network that night, and the passage was blocked, so he remained where he was.
Mr. Shem Tov tried to keep on good terms with his captors. He prepared their food, cleaned the living quarters and washed dishes in an unspoken agreement that he believed earned him better treatment. When another part of the tunnel collapsed, he labored, seven hours a day for two weeks, to help his captors clear a passage large enough to crawl through.
Mr. Shem Tov clung to his newfound faith.
He blessed his food and eked out a small bottle of a grape-flavored drink he’d been given by his captors, saving it for the blessing over the wine on Friday evenings. He said his captors were amused when he placed his hand on his head, instead of a skullcap, and uttered the familiar prayer.
Now home, Mr. Shem Tov, like other released hostages, is still recovering.
His father said he came back more mature, more focused. Mr. Shem Tov wants to study acting, and he recently returned from a speaking tour of Jewish communities in the United States.
And he said that he prays daily in his bedroom with tefillin.
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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