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An Absent State and Missing Questions

47 0
17.11.2025

By a strange twist of fate, one of my daughters is called after Hadar Goldin, the captured Israeli soldier whose body was recently returned by Hamas from Gaza after eleven years.

In 2005, I was living in Cambridge, UK, commuting to the City of London where I worked in commercial law. My son was a year and a half, and I was heavily pregnant with twins, sex unknown. I never knew the sex of any of my babies before they arrived.

Unable to waddle to the Cambridge student synagogue on the Jewish sabbath, I would eagerly await any community news my husband would bring on his return. That sabbath, I believe it was in the early summer of 2005, he returned with news of a family Goldin. The father was an academic, and they had twin boys enrolled in Chesterton Community College. He explained that they were a very quiet family, very modest, very unassuming. We wondered how the boys would handle the school, which was known to be rather boisterous.

But the most remarkable thing for me was learning that one of the Goldin twin boys was called Hadar. Before then, I had thought that Hadar could only be a girl’s name. In that instant, I decided that irrespective of the sex of the second child that I was carrying, it would be called Hadar.

And so she was. My daughter is called after Hadar Goldin. And I have always thought of her in this way.

Although personal circumstances have prevented me from taking a front role in clamoring for........

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