The Jewish hostage nobody is talking enough about
Elizabeth Tsurkov has spent 682 days in captivity in Iraq. For her sister, Emma, watching the Gaza hostages go free brings a special kind of joy — and pain
Emma Tsurkov, at center with glasses, led a protest outside the Iraqi embassy on March 21, 2024, exactly a year after her sister, Elizabeth, was kidnapped from a Baghdad cafe. Courtesy of Dafna Lender
By Jodi Rudoren January 31, 2025
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Watching the videos of Israeli hostages being released from Gaza the last two weeks has brought a special kind of joy — and pain — to Emma Tsurkov.
She does not know Emily, Romi, Doron, Karina, Daniella, Naama, Liri, Arbel, Agam or Gadi. She is no closer than any of us to the relatives who enveloped them in homecoming hugs or the friends who cheered their arrival at watch parties.
But Tsurkov understands their eyes in a way most of us never could, because she has spent the last 22 months toiling to secure the release of another Israeli hostage — her sister, Elizabeth, who is being held not by Hamas but by another Islamist terror group, not in Gaza but in Iraq.
“I’m so happy for the families, just seeing these women come out from under the rubble, and be alive,” Emma told me this week. “It has been so nourishing to see that this is possible,” she added. “Of course I’m deeply, deeply jealous, because I would like to have a similar moment.”
Who is Elizabeth Tsurkov?
Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli graduate student at Princeton University, was doing field research for her dissertation when militants from the Shiite group Kata’ib Hezbollah snatched her from a Baghdad cafe on March 21, 2023. Though her case has been overshadowed by the plight of the 240 people Hamas abducted from Israel during the Oct. 7 terror attacks, it has lately popped back into some headlines.
On Thursday, Amwaj.media, a U.K.-based news outlet that covers Iran and Iraq, reported that Iraq and Lebanon have proposed swapping Tsurkov, now 38, for seven Hezbollah fighters and a Lebanese naval captain captured during Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon last fall; Israeli officials have not commented on the report, which was based on unnamed sources in Baghdad and Beirut.
The Amwaj report came a week after Iraq’s foreign minister, while at Davos, told Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist who works for Axios, that Elizabeth Tsurkov was alive and that Iraq’s prime minister was working for her release. Emma, who is 37 and does quantitative research for the Anti-Defamation League, was unmoved — especially after the foreign minister, upon returning home to Iraq, put out a weird statement about not having realized he was talking to a journalist.
“Nothing has actually happened,” she told me. “The Iraqi government has been saying for two years they’re working on it; it’s not real. They have yet to share a single thing they’ve actually done.
“The Iraqi government is playing games again.”
A mother’s promise
The release of the Gaza hostages — in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners under the terms of a six-week ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas — has felt personal and visceral for many Jews in Israel and around the world.
My friend Esther texted me a photo of Emily Damari, one of the first three women freed under the deal, noting how much they look alike. “So much to process,” Jessica Steinberg, who has written hundreds of stories about the hostages for the Times of Israel, wrote in her Substack newsletter this morning.
And on Facebook, several rabbis I know shared their wrenching emotions over the fact that the first batch of Palestinians freed included the man responsible for the 1996 Jerusalem bus bombing that killed their friends Matt Eisenfeld, an American rabbinical student, and Sara Duker, his fiancé.
I watch the reunion video clips over and over. The paleness of Agam Berger’s skin is a marker of months spent in underground tunnels. I am awed by the poise and strength of the mother holding this young woman on her lap.
“Yehiye tov, yehiye tov, yehiye tov,” she murmurs to her baby — Hebrew for it will be OK. “We’re here and not leaving you ever and all eternity.” Haftacha shel ima, she says; a mother’s promise. She repeats it twice, like an oath.
Agam Berger, 20, an Israel Defense Forces soldier abducted during the Oct, 7 Hamas terror attacks, reunites with her parents on Thursday after 481 days in captivity in Gaza. (YouTube)
682 days
Emma Tsurkov has taken a sort of oath herself, to do everything possible to get Elizabeth out. The children of Soviet refuseniks, they have always been each other’s closest friends and thought partners. They spoke or texted every day no matter where they were in the world — which is how Emma sensed immediately that something had happened on that awful day nearly two years ago.
For months after the abduction, Emma would instinctively grab her phone to text Elizabeth tidbits about her life, even calling her a few times and half-not realizing there would not be an answer. “For every topic in your life, there is someone who will ‘get you’ the best,” Emma explained. “She was my person for like 70% of the topics I have in my head.”
Serious topics, like the length of the university tenure process. But also: trash TV they watched as kids, like the MTV show Pimp My Ride.
It’s been 682 days since Elizabeth was kidnapped from the Baghdad cafe. “I still think, ‘I wish she were here so I could tell her this,’ but I don’t have that habit anymore,” Emma said of grabbing the phone to send a text. “It kind of saddens me that it’s more of a thought now rather than an instinct.”
“I still think, ‘I wish she were here so I could tell her this,’ but I don’t have that habit anymore,” Emma said of grabbing the phone to send a text. “It kind of saddens me that it’s more of a thought now rather than an instinct.”
What’s next?
Tsurkov, who has a full time job and a toddler, still spends hours each week writing letters to members of Congress and talking to journalists about Elizabeth’s case. She is hopeful that the Trump administration will prioritize it more than its predecessor, and is trying to get a meeting with Adam Boehler, the new special envoy for hostages.
“In the first week I couldn’t imagine it could last a week. Now that it has been almost two years, I need to hold onto hope that it will be over soon. If I think of what’s my 10-year strategy, I think it would break my spirit.”Emma Tsurkov, whose sister is a hostage in Iraq
She has not gotten involved with the Israeli hostage families — “it’s too hard,” she said, “it feels like I can’t breathe.” Nor has she connected with the Foley Foundation, an advocacy group for American hostages around the world named for James W. Foley, the journalist and teacher kidnapped while reporting in Syria in 2012 and beheaded by ISIS two years later, because she cannot fathom joining the ranks of families who count their loved ones’ ordeals in years.
“In the first week I couldn’t imagine it could last a week,” Emma said. “Now that it has been almost two years, I need to hold onto hope that it will be over soon. If I think of what’s my 10-year strategy, I think it would break my spirit.”
But just like Agam Berger’s mom, Emma maintains her poise and strength, her instincts.
“I try to focus on what’s the next thing I can do,” she said, “who’s the next person I can contact and try to explain why my sister’s case should be even easier to solve than the case in Gaza.”
I cannot wait to watch their reunion video.
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