By Jodi Rudoren November 15, 2024

This is a story so tiny I thought for a minute it might not be worth telling. It’s about coffee, and also about the hostages on their 405th day of capitivity in Gaza. I think it’s really about connection and humanity. About finding small ways — amid an avalanche of news that can feel paralyzing — to remind yourself of what you think is important.

It’s a story about my friend Josh Katz, who lives a few blocks away from me in Montclair, New Jersey, and used to be president of our Reform synagogue. Josh is a security consultant who teaches self-defense and, since Oct. 7, an activist fighting antisemitism. He is 48, and has a daughter and son who are in their first years of college and high school. Invite Josh to a potluck and he brings a batch of killer brownies. On Rosh Hashanah during the pandemic, he showed up in my driveway blowing a shofar.

Josh is also a committed drinker of coffee. He makes himself a cup in his Keurig — Green Mountain’s Dark Magic, with a tablespoon of heavy cream and a Splenda — every weekday afternoon.

And, I learned this week, he does this at 3 p.m. because that’s when Sasha Troufanov, a Russian-Israeli engineer who is one of the 101 hostages still in Gaza, used to take his coffee breaks at work.

“I go take my cup of coffee and I’m just reminded that’s there’s a person in a Hamas tunnel somewhere, I’m reminded that there’s a human side to this entire situation,” Josh told me. “It has kept me connected to the reality of somebody being missing and somebody being scared and trapped.”

Troufanov was in the news this week because Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the No. 2 terror group in Gaza behind Hamas, released a new propaganda video of him looking bedraggled. In it, he talks about Israel’s ground invasion and says he is suffering from a skin condition and lack of food, water and basic hygiene supplies.

Troufanov turned 29 on Monday, his second birthday in captivity. He lived with his girlfriend in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan and worked at a microelectronics company owned by Amazon. On Oct. 7, he and his girlfriend were visiting his parents and grandmother on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the Israeli community hardest hit by the attacks. Troufanov’s father, Vitaly, was killed; his mother, grandmother and girlfriend were all kidnapped alongside him and released during the weeklong ceasefire a year ago.

“I am relieved to see my son alive, but I am very worried to hear what he is saying,” Sasha’s mother, Yelena Troufanova, said in a statement. “I urge that every effort be made to secure his immediate release and that of all other hostages. They have no time left.”

Neither Josh nor I watched the video — most news outlets don’t publish them because they are obvious propaganda tools of terror groups. But its existence felt personal to Josh, and led him to tell me and our rabbi about the whole coffee ritual, something he has mostly kept to himself.

Josh is not shy about his pro-Israel politics (or anything else). He kept a We Stand With Israel sign on his lawn for months after the attacks, has helped organize rallies and spoken at public meetings since Oct. 7, and wears provocative T-shirts with slogans like “I am not a Jew with trembling knees” or “Israel, EST 1293 BC.”

But when when I told Josh I wanted to write about the 3 o’clock coffees, he hesitated. “It’s not something I’m doing so that people find out about it and think I’m cool,” he said. “It’s not performative, to me.”

Like many American Jews, Josh was transformed by Oct. 7. He felt newly and deeply connected to Israel — but he’s never been there, so the connection felt abstract. He did not have a cousin or a friend or a memory to tie him to a particular slice of the story.

Then, last fall, he heard about an Israeli jewelry designer donating part of her proceeds to the survivors from Nir Oz. He bought rings for himself and his daughter — hers is an owl, his a wolf, with blue and white crystals — and he started focusing his attention on Nir Oz, learning what he could about those who were killed and kidnapped. Including Sasha Troufanov.

It was months later that Josh saw an Instagram post showing people taking 3 p.m. coffee breaks in honor of Troufanov, and it just clicked for him.

“I was like, ‘I drink coffee every day at 2 p.m., I’ll switch it to 3, it will be a nice reminder,’” he explained. “It’s faded a little bit. It’s faded in our minds about the actual people. We get caught up in ‘we have a right to live in the land, we have a right to live in peace’ and it doesn’t connect you to the real reality and fear that people have that someone’s going to come over the hill. That’s what this does.”

There have been other campaigns like #coffee4sasha aimed at giving people a sense of personal connection to the hostages. Yoga lovers around the world synched their practices on the 40th birthday of yogi Carmel Gat and in her memory after she was one of six hostages found murdered in a Hamas tunnel on Aug. 30. I carried a card with the face of Uriel Baruch for months, said kaddish for him when he was declared dead, and made his and other hostages’ favorite cookies on Purim.

Josh has no idea how many other people do the 3 o’clock coffees, but he likes the idea that he’s not the only one. It’s similar to how he feels about fasting on Yom Kippur or avoiding bread on Passover; he does these things to feel connected communally.

“I don’t need to be in a special Facebook group for 3 o’clock coffee with Sasha,” he told me. “I know there are people doing it and so I’m connected to them, and I wanted to connect with him.

“It’s that ritual, and trying to take the time on a daily basis — the way people do with prayer, the way people do with other things — you’re trying to step outside yourself,” Josh continued. “None of us can be expected to not go on with our lives. We’re all supposed to be moving on; we have jobs, we’re not supposed to not have fun. But certainly in the hustle and bustle of that, I think it’s important to remember.”

I think so, too. It’s almost 3 p.m. now. I might make mine decaf.

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