After 15 months of war, Israelis are all scaffolding, helping hold each other up

Jessica Steinberg
January 9, 2025

JERUSALEM — There’s one thought I keep on having over and over, every day: Anyone I pass on the street, in a store, on the bus, on the train, in the train station, at the supermarket, as I walk the dog — anyone at all — could be in mourning, bereaved, injured, a survivor, in recovery.

I went to Haifa on Sunday to do some reporting, traveling from my home in Jerusalem on public transit: the bus to the train, switching trains once during the two-hour ride, then another bus in Haifa to my first destination, the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art.

Nothing on my Haifa reporting agenda had much to do with the war. I was at the museum to check out an exhibit about artist Katsushika Hokusai’s classic print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” visiting the Haifa City Museum’s exhibit about the Sussita car, and screening a documentary about the Technion.

But as I rode the buses and trains and walked through the train stations, full on Sunday mornings with soldiers heading back to their bases, I kept on looking at their young faces, wondering how many funerals they’ve attended this year, what kind of burdens they’re carrying.

You know how it is when you’re making your way somewhere, on your own, watching the faces around you. You wonder, you make up stories, you think about a person’s back story.

Circles of grief

The night before, my husband and I had visited the tents where Effie and Oshrat Shoham and their four surviving sons were sitting shiva for their son and brother Yuval, a 22-year-old soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who was killed in an accident while serving in Gaza.

The shiva tents were set up in a mostly unused playground on a quiet side street in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood, and filled with several circles of mourners, probably 200 people in total. Effie and Oshrat are community leaders, who helped found Hakhel, a pluralistic synagogue also attended by the family of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage from the Nova festival on Oct. 7 and executed in a Gaza tunnel last summer.

We first sat with our friends Nomi and Dan Oren — Nomi is Effie’s sister — hearing about what the last year has been like for Yuval. Then we joined a kind of receiving line, where Effie sat or squatted with individual visitors, often hugging them.

We had talked on the way over about what we would say to them — what could we say?

We told Effie that we’re from Kehillat Maayanot, the Conservative shul in neighboring Talpiot, where his wife had spoken recently, and that we’re old friends of his sister- and brother-in-law Nomi and Dan. And that his sorrow was ours.

He looked at us and nodded as we spoke. And he told us that we’re part of his scaffolding, the larger community that surrounds and supports him. Scaffolding. Really, the perfect word for this sense of trying to mentally hold all the anguish around us, to take some of the load off.

‘When is this going to end?’

The next day, as I traveled around Haifa and then Tel Aviv, I held onto this word: Scaffolding. I kept thinking, as several more soldiers were killed in Gaza, and another three people in a terrorist attack in the northern West Bank, that while I’m doing my thing — interviewing a source, riding a bus, buying my son a new winter jacket, picking out Golden Delicious and Pink Lady apples at the store — other people are in mourning, going through the worst moments of their lives.

When I went to shop for that jacket at a neighborhood store where I’ve bought my teenage twins so many pairs of sneakers and socks and hoodies, the owner’s friend was sitting in a chair, banging a hanger against his knee.

I was checking the size of the jacket, and he wanted to talk about the three soldiers who were killed over the course of the last two days, fighting in northern Gaza.

He banged the hanger, and asked me, “When is this going to end? When will there be no more soldiers killed? What can I do to make this stop?”

I had no answer for him, just as I have no answer for myself when I ask those questions.

At that moment, I just wanted to buy the jacket and get out of there, even if he thought I was just some bourgeois mom who cared only about her kid’s winter coat.

And at that moment, maybe that’s exactly what I was, because that’s what life is like right now. You’re in mourning and then you’re not. You’re weeping for another loss and then you’re in a yoga class. You’re writing about another anguished hostage mom, and then you’re turning your sourdough.

Another hostage death

The next afternoon, my husband and I went to the Israel Museum for a parent meeting of our son’s art program. As we heard about what the class has done this year, our phones pinged with the news that Yosef Al Zayadni, a Bedouin man who was taken hostage on Oct. 7 from a kibbutz where he worked in the dairy barn, had been found dead in a Gaza tunnel.

Al Zayadani was abducted with three of his children. Two of them, Bilal and Aisha, were under 18, and among the 100 hostages freed during a weeklong Israel-Hamas ceasefire in November 2023. Yosef’s 22-year-old son, Hamza, is probably either also dead, or in terrible danger.

My mind filled for a moment with all I knew about the Al Zaydani family. Filled with the photograph, now so familiar from all the hostage posters, of Yosef standing against a red, handwoven fabric typical in Bedouin villages. And then I returned to what the art teacher was telling us, and the images of the students’ artwork on the screen.

Maybe I took my mind off of the terrible news because I can. Or maybe Yosef and all the other hostages and survivors are always there, flitting in and out as much as I allow them.

I’m just part of the scaffolding, and it’s a good thing I’m not the only one helping hold things up.

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