Among the 220 empty seats at a carefully laid table for Shabbat were five highchairs representing the babies and children held hostage by Hamas.
Baby bottles, plastic cutlery and beakers lay nestled among the dinner plates, bottles of red wine, challah bread and candles on top of a white tablecloth.
Photographs of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, were among the faces on the posters strapped to empty chairs to represent the hundreds of people who have been held hostage in Gaza since 7 October.
The poignant installation at JW3, a Jewish community centre in Finchley, north London, follows symbolic events held around the world to serve as a reminder of the horror of the Hamas terror attacks.
“These empty chairs that will not be full this Shabbat, they represent in a small way the scale, the enormity of the crimes,” Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi, said.
In an impassioned address that left some visitors in tears, he told how the peace of Shabbat had been shattered three weeks ago when Hamas militants stormed communities in southern Israel, an attack in which 1,400 people died and hundreds more were injured.
He said Hamas gunmen had cruelly dragged men, women and children into captivity, leaving their families enduring “indescribable heartbreak”.
Mirvis said: “We are sickened as we think of their plight, as we wonder what kind of a Shabbat will they be having tonight and tomorrow. What is their state of mind? What is their mental state? We know that some of them went into captivity with medical conditions. We know that some were shot at and are injured.
“And most critically of all, we wonder, with dread in our hearts, will they indeed come back safely home to the embrace of their families. And as you look out at these tables and these chairs right now, this is our statement that we care, we miss every single one of those captives. And we send out a strong message that for as long as they are in captivity, we will not rest.”
So far only four captives have been released. They are Judith Raanan, 59, and her daughter, Natalie, 17, who are Israeli-American, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old grandmother and peace campaigner, and Nurit Yitzhak, 79, who also goes by the name Nurit Cooper.
In a speech, Noam Sagi, whose 75-year-old mother, Ada Sagi, was kidnapped from the Nir Oz kibbutz, said: “An empty chair is a good illustration of how we feel in our hearts.”
The psychotherapist, 53, who grew up in the kibbutz but now lives in London, urged the British government to take action to help secure the hostages’ release. He also pressed the Israeli authorities to prioritise the captives, which include three-year-old Avigail Idan.
He told the Guardian that he was enduring “psychological torture”, before adding: “But I’m very, very resolved and focused on what I need to achieve to bring mum, her friends and all the captured home. I can’t afford to let fear, to let worry, take over. I just need to step in and just be brave because they are sitting in Gaza – that is fear. This is nothing.”
He said he was happy that four of the hostages were back home and that there was a mechanism in place to begin to establish trust. “But there’s a lot of work to do because we have a long list of people that we need to get back home,” he said.
