On the eve of the funeral for his wife and two sons, Yarden Bibas completed writing a Torah scroll in their memory. Shiri, and her two sons, Ariel (age 4) and Kfir (9 months), were taken hostage by Gazan Palestinians on Oct. 7, 2023, and brutally murdered by Hamas.
Yarden wrote the final three letters in the scroll in a ceremony led by Rabbi Shai Graucher, a young Hasidic rabbi, who received the Torah from The Palm Beach Synagogue. Yarden chose to place this Torah in the synagogue of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where both of his sons had their Brit Milah and where they were taken hostage.
The scroll is covered in orange, the color that has become a symbol of the Bibas family and has a picture of them on it with an inscription from Eichah (Lamentations 2:19) which laments the death of infants:
“Arise, cry out in the night, At the beginning of the watches; Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift your hands toward Him For the life of your young children, Who faint from hunger at the head of every street.”
Yarden was released last month. During his captivity, he had lost 33 pounds. He told Israeli authorities that he had been starved and not given any food on some days. He reported that he had mostly been held in isolation in an underground cell, rarely seeing sunlight. He was allowed to meet other hostages only during meals.
On 18 February, a Hamas spokesperson announced that the bodies of four hostages, including the remaining members of the Bibas family, would be released on 20 February, as part of the seventh round of the ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement. On 20 February, Hamas released four bodies, reported to be of Ariel, Kfir, Shiri, and a fourth hostage, Oded Lifshitz, who had also been kidnapped during the Nir Oz attack. The four bodies were taken to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for identification. Israel forensically confirmed the bodies of Ariel, Kfir, and Lifshitz, but it also confirmed that the fourth body did not belong to Shiri or any other Israeli hostage held by Hamas. Shiri Bibas’s remains were handed over separately the following day.
Following the return of the remains, Israel stated that a forensic analysis showed that Ariel and Kfir Bibas had been killed with “bare hands” in November 2023. According to Israel, the forensic analysis showed that Shiri Bibas had been “brutally murdered” together with her children, and that the corpses had then been mutilated to make it appear as if they died in a bombing.
