Six hundred miles and eight decades lie between the terrible parentheses on either end of the life of Shlomo Mantzur.
Mantzur—a diminutive carpenter, a father of five and grandfather of 12, a man whose only extravagance was a spectacular moustache—expected to end his life at the kibbutz in southern Israel where he fixed cupboards and clocks and tended his garden in the heat. He’d done his best to raise forward-looking Israeli children, bringing them cookies at recess when they were little, never burdening them with his past. When I met two of his daughters this week in Ramat Gan, in central Israel, they remembered him devising art projects for his grandchildren and plying them with ice cream on every visit. Their father, said Moshit, “broadcast optimism and lived in the here and now.”
Shlomo Mantzur was seized from his home at Kibbutz Kissufim, on the Gaza border, on the morning of October 7, 2023, as thousands of Palestinian gunmen attacked communities across southern Israel. The images of him that proliferated on Israeli streets afterward, in the form of hostage posters, depict a man with welcoming eyes and a grin. His personality seems unmistakable.
If the redheaded children Ariel and Kfir Bibas were famous as the youngest Israeli hostages—until last week, when the 4-year-old and 9-month-old were confirmed to have been killed—Mantzur was known as the oldest. He was 85 when he was taken. I’ve seen a photograph of red graffiti spray-painted by Israeli soldiers on a wall inside the Gaza battlefield: “Shlomo Mantzur, we’re coming.”
Mantzur was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1938. On the rare occasions when he spoke about the country of his birth, his daughters remembered, the stories tended to have happy endings. He grew up in Baghdad at a time when the population of the Iraqi capital was about one-third Jewish—a fact nearly impossible to imagine now. There was one story he told his children about an Arab worker in the small factory that Mantzur’s family owned, and where they manufactured cigarette packets. The worker’s long robe got caught in a machine, and he was about to be sucked into the gears, when little Shlomo noticed and shut the machine down just in time. He told a story about the frantic worry of his parents, David and Marcelle, when he disappeared one day, only to turn up hours later, unharmed—he’d snuck into a movie theater and stayed for more than one show.
The girls don’t remember hearing much more than that. They were Hebrew-speaking Israelis, and the teeming Islamic city of their father’s birth had little to do with them.
It was only in early 2023, a half-year before he was kidnapped, that Mantzur sat down to write about something else he remembered. His reason for writing at that particular time is unknown, just as the papers themselves were unknown until his children found them among documents retrieved from their parents’ home after his abduction.
