On October 7, 2023, teen boys Yagil and Or Yaakov were kidnapped from their home in Nir Oz, along with their father, Yair. In the chaos that followed, their uncle, Ziv Gome, launched a desperate effort that the family thought might help save them: securing German citizenship for the boys.
"[My sister] asked me to look into it," Gome said of the boys’ mother. "I had inner opposition to the idea of European citizenship, but as soon as she asked, I did it."
The family’s claim to citizenship was based on a formerly German great-grandmother who had survived a Nazi concentration camp — and who, under German law, was eligible to have her citizenship restored and passed down to her descendants.
The family had no idea if doing so would prove consequential, but they were grasping for whatever tools they had available.
"Nobody tells you what to do — you’re just trying to do everything you can," Gome said.
Under normal circumstances, obtaining German citizenship is a lengthy and bureaucratic process that typically takes around two and a half years. But within just two weeks, Yagil and Or, 12 and 16 at the time, were granted citizenship.
When the boys were released during the temporary ceasefire in late November 2023, "they had German passports waiting for them," their uncle said.
"The humanity of the German embassy...it wasn’t expected," he said with emotion.
The Yaakov boys were among an unknown number of hostages and their relatives who were quietly granted German citizenship in the weeks after the attack — part of a little-publicized but intensive effort by Berlin to assist Israelis with proven citizenship claims.
Coordinated largely through the German Embassy in Tel Aviv, the process took place almost entirely under the radar, with no public announcements or political fanfare. For those involved, it was one of the few tangible lifelines amid the uncertainty and grief.
Within hours after Hamas
..always the voice of sweet reason...launched its deadly October 7 onslaught, the German embassy in Tel Aviv says it began receiving desperate calls from Israelis and Germans who believed their loved ones had been taken into Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
More than two dozen of the 251 hostages taken into Gaza that day were either German citizens or members of families with German roots eligible for citizenship, according to the embassy.
"Nobody became a German as a favor or out of pity," Germany’s Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert told the Times of Israel in his office in Tel Aviv. "There are requirements that cannot be waived."
But when the legal conditions were met, German authorities moved very quickly by all accounts.
Dalja Gimpel, a German-Israeli immigration lawyer based in Tel Aviv who worked with a family of hostages to help them obtain German citizenship, emphasized how exceptional the process was.
"The German authorities dealt with it immediately. They really knew what was at stake," she said. "They were added to the [German] Foreign Ministry’s crisis unit list and treated as Germans."
A number of those who received citizenship were eligible thanks to a recent legal reform that significantly expanded eligibility.
Until 2021, German citizenship for descendants of Holocaust victims had only been available to those whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents had been stripped of their citizenship under the Nazi regime.
But that year, Germany widened the pool to include descendants of some Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who had never had citizenship, such as Polish Jews who lived in Germany before 1933 and were forced out because of their Jewish identity.
"So many people in Israel are descendants of Holocaust survivors or victims who were born in what used to be the German Reich," said the ambassador. He pointed out that the high number of German citizens or descendants among the hostages was, in part, a matter of geography.
"The kibbutzim in the Gaza border area were largely Ashkenazi — very ’Yekke,’" he said, using a slang term used to refer to German-speaking Jews. "That’s why so many of the hostages had German roots. If this had happened in Dimona, we would have seen a lot of hostages with North African ancestry instead."