The Hidden Toll: Reserve Families Bear the Deep Psychological Cost of Long War
Reserve families in Israel face profound loneliness, burnout, and psychological toll nearly three years into the ongoing war, as communities and social organizations struggle to cope.
On the first night of the war, Lihan Khalfon did not close her eyes. Her husband Noam was no longer at home, and a tense silence reigned in Shilo. "I looked through the peephole, I walked between the windows and cracks. I was terribly afraid that the Arabs here too would try to imitate what happened in Gaza," she recalls.
A few hours earlier, she had still been laughing at him. Noam, who had injured his leg before the war, started packing a bag. "Well, who is going to call you with your leg?" she told him. And then the message arrived. The first time he returned home was, according to Lihan's exact count, after three weeks and twenty-four hours. "In the first weeks he also didn't communicate. We could barely talk on the phone," she says. "Every such day that he doesn't arrive feels like two years."
Only after about 150 days of reserve duty, during three days of processing within the unit, did Noam understand what the main difficulty of many fighters was - and it is not necessarily related to sacrifices on the battlefield. "I expected everyone to talk about the moments when they were wounded, and precisely those were not the difficult moments. The difficult moments were leaving home," he says.
From here, an insight was born that, according to him, changed the unit: "The fighter standing in front of you is not the event. The event is the wife and children who are at home, and that is where the emphasis needs to be placed."
The unit began to direct more attention to families. Outside of it, Lihan says, the exact opposite happened. "Today people are sure that whoever does reserve duty does it because it pays off financially for them. No one understands that there are people who truly continue to go to reserves out of ideals."
At the beginning of the war, people brought food, offered to take the children from kindergarten, or asked how she was coping. Today, she says, that has almost disappeared. "Even from close female friends, there is no longer that same interest."
Children struggle to return to routine
That burnout is also felt by Neria and Dvir Cohen, residents of Shilo. Dvir, a therapist, psychotherapist, and educational counselor, left the synagogue on Simchat Torah straight to reserve duty and stayed for almost half a year continuously. Neria, a makeup artist and bridal hairstylist, stayed with the children and with work that cannot be stopped - while in early pregnancy.
The price did not take long to show with the children either. At a parent-teacher meeting, the teacher suggested checking if their daughter has attention and concentration issues. "I told her: do you know that we have already been two months into reserve duty, and the girl is carrying a tremendous load. And then she tells me: wow, the truth is we didn't think about it."
The youngest daughter was a year and a half old when Dvir went out for the first round. "Suddenly he disappeared on her for half a year, and then after a few months disappeared again for a few months," Neria says. For a period, arriving at kindergarten became an event of crying and screaming. "I think the greatest difficulty in reserve duty is loneliness," she says. "You feel that you are carrying all the difficulty, and the entire people of Israel continue as usual."
Signs also appeared in the Khalfon family. The eldest daughter stopped sleeping alone, the young son has difficulty falling asleep when his father is not home, and the eldest returned to sleeping with his finger in his mouth. "They raised red flags for us a long time ago," Lihan says. "Every time we thought we would manage to solve it alone, until we realized it is much deeper. Only now, after three years, did we send them to therapy."
The NGO born from a child's trauma
Chava Kleinman, a social worker with thirty years of experience and deputy CEO of the Shilo Foundation NGO, encounters these phenomena over and over again. "I truly think the greatest crisis in the country is the reserve families crisis," she says. "We did not anticipate that this situation would last for so long."
Shilo Foundation itself was born out of a child's trauma. More than two decades ago, David Rubin, a resident of Shilo who immigrated from the United States, was traveling with his three-year-old son when terrorists opened fire at them. Rubin was hit in the leg and his son in the head. "The bullet that entered his head missed the brainstem by a millimeter," he recounts.
After returning home, Rubin noticed that his son was reenacting the terror attack through playing with dolls. "He picked up a doll and told me: this is the dad, he has a hole in his leg. And then he picked up another doll: this is a baby." Rubin understood that the child was trying to process what he went through. "I understood that I needed to do something with this." Out of this experience, the NGO grew.
More than two decades later, it deals with a much broader reality. According to Shilo Foundation data, over the past year, more than 4,000 children received emotional treatment and support through the NGO. Among the children of reserve families, Kleinman says, she sees regression, sleep difficulties, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating. "They are truly occupied with the moment: what will be? Who will be at home today? Who will take me?"
According to her, precisely the fact that the situation has become common makes it difficult to recognize how abnormal it is. "It already looks normative to you. It is not."
Neria has a simple request: "I would be glad if there is more recognition, if they truly understand this thing called reserve families. What the man goes through, what the woman goes through, what the children go through." And what does she ask for in practice? "Support in daily life."
Almost three years after the war began, this is perhaps the easiest thing to forget: every time the fighter walks out the door again, part of the war remains at home.
