On Oct. 7, 2023, Sapir Cohen was visiting her boyfriend’s family for the holiday at their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
It was meant to be a peaceful weekend in the beautiful kibbutz where her boyfriend, Alexander “Sasha” Tourfanov, had lived since he was a child with his mother, Lena, his father, Vitaly, and his grandmother, Irena Tati.
Instead, on that terrible day, Sasha, Lena, Irena and Sapir were captured by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and taken into Gaza. Vitaly, who loved his adopted kibbutz family, the fields of Nir Oz and feeding stray cats, was murdered.
Sapir, Yelena, and Irena returned to Israel during the first hostage deal in late November of 2023, one day apart. Sasha returned 500 days later, in the latest hostage deal this past March.
And this week, the couple that reunited against every odd got engaged. A picture of the two of them smiling by the water, Sapir holding a bouquet of roses and showing off a diamond ring, was shared far and wide across social media.
It was a moment that, just a few months prior, Sasha didn’t think would ever come. On the day the two reunited, hugging and holding each other as Sapir and Lena sobbed, Sasha told his girlfriend that while he was being held hostage, he kept praying for her to move on. He desperately wanted her to find a man who would love her. “He didn’t want me to wait for a man that would never come home,” Sapir said in a press conference. Sasha, who celebrated two birthdays while being held hostage, firmly believed that he would never go back home.
But Sapir waited.
“I met Sasha a year and a half ago through an app, and the moment I saw that face, I just liked it, without even thinking twice,” she shared in an interview. “He’s the only man I’ve wanted in my life.”
Before he came home in March, the last time Sapir saw her beloved partner was surrounded by terrorists, fearing for his life. “He looks at me and yells ‘no, no’ — that’s the last time, the last communication between us. I couldn’t say anything, and I didn’t want to say goodbye,” Sapir recounted. After her first few weeks in captivity, her body recovering from the bruises of being violently captured, she was reunited with Lena, who wept when she first saw her. She believed that both she and Sasha had been killed. “The moment she saw me, she suddenly got a lot of hope,” Sapir told Mako.
Lena and Sapir fought for Sasha after they returned to Israel. Since his family came to Israel alone from Russia, instead of relatives, they had an army of friends from all walks of life who rallied to bring attention to his plight. They started #Coffee4Sasha, an initiative to remind people of him by having a daily coffee break at 3 p.m., the same time Sasha would urge his AWS colleagues to take a caffeine break. They got four video proofs of life from Sasha during that time, which left them both heartened and heartbroken at the fact that he was still not home.
Since Sasha returned, he’s been, like many other former hostages, fighting for the return of his friends still there, especially 21-year-old Rom Braslavski, an off duty soldier taken from the Nova party, with whom he was held, and for those from his community of Nir Oz still being held by Hamas, like David Cunio.
In the past few months, Sasha and Sapir have been touring the U.S., telling their harrowing story of survival. The two got engaged in California, and in the picture, you can see idyllic ocean waves behind them.
When he was being held in Gaza, Troufanov recalled in his first TV interview after being released, he drew a picture of the beach he used to frequent growing up in Ashkelon. Two men were fishing in the waves, two women sitting on beach chairs, watching them. The men, he hoped, would be him and his father, and the women, his mother and Sapir.
“Not all the dreams come true in the way that you would hope,” he told Israeli media, because he and his father would never fish again like they did when he was a child. But he wondered if the picture was of another dream that might come true: “Maybe it’s me and my son, so let’s find out.”
We’re so happy Sasha and Sapir are making their dreams of starting a family together come true by the waves. We wish them a hearty mazel tov and hope that by their wedding, they’ll have their ultimate dream of seeing all the hostages back home come true.
