'There's no playbook for an employee being taken hostage'

How a Nvidia exec came to be a leader in the October 7 hostage advocacy movement

Gideon Rosenberg, head of HR for 5,000 workers in Israel, talks about going above and beyond for his employee Avinatan Or, who was held in Hamas tunnels in Gaza for two years

For 745 days, Nvidia senior executive Gideon Rosenberg waited hopefully for the moment he would meet abducted employee Avinatan Or, held captive in Gaza’s tunnels since the Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023.

Two months ago, it finally happened. Rosenberg, deputy general counsel and head of HR for the American chip giant’s Israel operations, recounted how excited he was to welcome Or — a person he felt he had come to know very well, though they had never met in person.

“When I met Avinatan at the hospital a few days after his release, it was absolutely surreal,” Rosenberg told The Times of Israel during a recent interview at Nvidia’s Tel Aviv office. “Until that point, he was a two-dimensional person on a poster and on the t-shirt I had been wearing for two years — and then suddenly, he’s three-dimensional, a real person. That was just very, very strange, but of course we were all very happy.”

Rosenberg, 49, is the personnel director for Nvidia’s 5,000 employees in Israel, who work out of five offices and R&D hubs in the cities of Yokne’am, Ra’anana, Tel Aviv, and Beersheba. Or, 32, grew up in the West Bank town of Shilo, the second of seven brothers, and joined Nvidia as an electrical engineer after graduating from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.

“I know more about Avinatan than I know about any other employee — although we had never met — as I got to know and spent many hours with all of his close and extended family as well as friends,” said Rosenberg. “I’m pretty sure I know more about him than he would want a manager to know, from stories about his childhood and other tales.”

Or, who was released on October 13 as part of a ceasefire deal with the Hamas terror group in Gaza, was mostly held alone in underground tunnels after he was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. His girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was also kidnapped from the festival and was rescued by Israeli forces in June 2024.

The ceasefire deal marked a key step toward ending a tumultuous two-year war triggered by the October 7 atrocities, during which thousands of marauding terrorists from Gaza slaughtered some 1,200 people and abducted 251 to the Strip. The hostages, living and dead, have been released in tranches over the last two years, in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners, and Or was among the final living hostages to be freed.

“There’s no playbook for an employee being taken hostage,” said Rosenberg. “We had to make that up as we went along, while continuing our daily jobs and taking care of other employees who were on reserve duty, evacuated from home, or who lost family members and friends.”

In the days following October 7, Rosenberg stepped up his own efforts, gathering Nvidia employees to support Or’s family and friends at frequent marches and rallies. But he did not envision that he would become a main voice in advocating for the hostages’ release for over two years, together with their families.

“Once we confirmed that Avinatan was taken hostage on October 7, I wrote a personal email to notify Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was very empathetic. He sent out a note to all employees worldwide, and has, throughout the past two years, shown continuous support for the family, spoken about [Or] at internal company events, and also in public appearances,” Rosenberg said.

Or and Huang met last week at Nvidia’s US headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Argamani, who was also at the meeting, described Nvidia as “one big family.”

Throughout the entire two years that Or was held captive, Huang “personally accompanied the family and called repeatedly to ask how they were doing,” she said.

“Seeing how the company stood by him the entire time shows us what true mutual responsibility really means — how even in days of success and prosperity, they stood by their employee, and fought alongside us,” Argamani wrote in a post on social media platform X.

From the first days of Or’s captivity in October 2023, Rosenberg decided to do everything he could for his employee to come back home alive. Initially, the Nvidia veteran and father of three kids showed up every evening, standing with Or’s family outside the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv. In the days and weeks that followed, he also participated in marches of the hostage families to Jerusalem and other locations.

“We started helping the family with printing t-shirts and signs [with Or’s picture and slogans with a call to bring him home], and every Sunday, I sent an email with a link to an Excel sheet for employees to sign up Monday through Thursday to support the family,” Rosenberg said. “Wearing Avinatan’s t-shirt at one of the marches in November 2023, I offered my help to the organizers, and before I knew it, I was handed a megaphone and was leading the crowd up front shouting: ‘We won’t stop until they are all back,’ and other chants.”

“I have a very loud voice, and I am tall, which is helpful,” he added.

The protest organizers asked Rosenberg to come back the next day, a request he felt he could not refuse, despite having family commitments. Since then and over the next two years of conflict, he wore the t-shirt with Or’s printed picture and became a vocal advocate for the hostage families at large demonstrations, marches, daily gatherings, and on stage at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, including on Fridays and Saturdays.

“I promised the hostage families, I’m not going to lose my voice. You got my voice until they all come back,” said Rosenberg. “I never lost my voice.”

For Rosenberg, one of the chants he came up with, “You are not alone, we are with you,” became the guiding idea behind his frequent attendance at rallies.

“Being a hostage family is a very lonely place, and I always connected it to the analogy of a phone: before you go to sleep, and sometimes during the day, you charge it, as you want to make sure that it’s 100% when you wake up in the morning,” said Rosenberg. “The families are the same — you need to charge them with energy so that they can continue their days, and getting them to 100% is impossible unless you bring them back their loved ones, and even then, it is not going to be 100%.”

“That was my support role — to make sure that they could continue, and that they didn’t feel that they were alone in this fight to bring back their loved ones, however they wanted to conduct that fight, their struggle each to his own,” he said.

Asked about how he balanced his role as a senior executive at Nvidia and family life during the challenging period, he said that he was a very “efficient” person with a strong team that knows how to do its job, whether he was at his desk or away.

“I’m always available, so even during marches, I could answer the phone,” Rosenberg said. “For Nvidia, part of my work was to make sure Avinatan comes home, so from my perspective, it was fairly easy to balance and justify the situation.”

“If you asked some of the families and a lot of people who were surrounding us in Hostages Square, most of them had no idea what I did for a living, and that was good because it was never about me,” he said.

Nvidia’s R&D activities in Israel, where many of its high-end processors and networking chips essential for training the largest AI models are developed, are already the firm’s largest outside of the US. The appetite for Nvidia’s chips has been driving the company’s stock price rapidly since early 2023, turning it into the world’s first $5 trillion company at the end of October.

“Since October 7, Nvidia has significantly grown its presence here in Israel, and despite a lot of people being out on reserve duty, we didn’t miss any milestones,” Rosenberg noted.

Since the release, Rosenberg has been in regular contact with Or and is patiently hoping for his return to work after a rehabilitation period.

“We don’t have that conversation at this point in time,” said Rosenberg. “It will take time for him to get back into his group of work, but I’m sure he’s capable of doing it.”

“It’s just a question of whether that will be his decision,” he said.

Looking back at these most challenging two years, Rosenberg said that it was important to him to set a personal example that it is possible to balance life, work, family, and do other things.

“By other things, I mean things that could benefit society as a whole, not just themselves, whether it’s an hour a week, or an hour a month helping somebody, but everybody can find that ability,” he said. “Civic involvement, not just in times of crisis.”