NEW YORK — Ellen Muss, a Jewish activist in New York City, has attended rallies for the hostages held in Gaza for more than two years, often carrying “missing person” milk cartons showing the faces of the captives.

On Sunday, Muss and other advocates for the hostages gathered one last time in Central Park in below-freezing temperatures, as icy snow covered the ground and children were bundled in snowsuits. Less than one week earlier, the body of Ran Gvili, the final hostage, had been recovered in Gaza.

“We never thought that we would see this day, that there would be no more hostages left in Gaza,” Muss said, as she bid farewell to the demonstrations. “We’ve been out here since the beginning, every Sunday, so it’s a feeling of relief.”

The core group of activists continued to gather at the weekly meetings in the park after the Israeli-led Hostages and Missing Families Forum ended most of its activities in late December, more than two months after the final living hostages returned home.

The Sunday rally marked a final, bittersweet chapter for the group, which has hosted the emotional events, and found community with each other, since shortly after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack. But not everybody plans to say goodbye: Some attendees hope to harness the energy of the rallies and direct it toward other areas of advocacy.

The advocacy efforts in New York City for the hostages began immediately after the October 7 attack, as the community grappled with the devastation in southern Israel and the catastrophic kidnapping of 251 people. The effort to free the hostages served as common ground for nearly all of the New York City Jewish community, whose roughly 1 million members are often riven by political and religious divides.

The Central Park rallies, as well as similar events in the city, sometimes drew thousands of participants, including former hostages, families of the captives, Jewish community leaders and elected officials.

After the hostages forum ceased operations late last year, local organizer Barbara Bezalel called some of the other New York demonstrators and found an interest in keeping the Central Park rallies going as long as there was a slain captive still in Gaza. Sunday’s meeting was not affiliated with the hostages forum.

“We felt that we needed to continue,” she said. “It’s just a group that felt that they still needed to stand and show presence here, and to inform people that, yes, there still is one more hostage, yes, there still needs to be somebody to come home, and yes, we promised to be here until the last hostage.”

At the end, a core group of several dozen gathered on Sunday at their traditional meeting point in the Upper West Side. (A rally planned for last week, after the recovery of Gvili’s body, was canceled due to a........

© The Times of Israel