From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernici, and this is the daily.

When Hamas attacked Israel two weeks ago, they took 200 hostages back with them into the

Gaza Strip, including grandparents and children as young as nine months old.

It was one of the largest mass abductions in recent history.

Now, the fate of those hostages is at the center of a deepening crisis in the Middle

East and a looming ground invasion into Gaza.

Today, a conversation with the mother of one of them.

It's Friday, October 20th.

I called Rachel Goldberg for the first time, last Tuesday, three days after the attack on October 7th.

Hi. Hi, Rachel. How are you doing?

Well, are you a mother? I'm not.

Well, I'm sure you've had a mother. I have.

So you can imagine what she would be going through if something happened to you.

Yeah. So that's how I'm doing.

My name is Rachel Goldberg. I'm 53, and I am in Jerusalem.

So my son, Hirsch Goldberg Poland, is currently missing. He's been missing since he attended the music

festival that was in the southern part of Israel. And he was there Saturday morning when the

terrorist event happened there. We received two text messages from him at 8-11,

and that's the last that we've heard of him.

Can you tell me about your son? So Hirsch, well, he's the perfect son for me.

There's a lot of him that it's the good parts of me. He just turned 23 last week on October 3rd.

So he was born in Berkeley, and when he was going into 2nd grade, our family moved to Jerusalem,

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