Serendipitous gifts are all around us: The invisible threads connecting Israelis in times of loss

I was driving to the supermarket in Efrat to buy one, when I saw, along a grassy area on the side of the road, six lovely women in exquisitely colored silken saris. They were all caregivers of elderly members of the senior day center in Efrat, right next to this beautiful lawn. While their charges are in classes, they sometimes rest on picnic tables on the grass.

He brought back a beautiful gold-trimmed silk wedding sari for her, and we have a photo of her in it. That same sari also adorned the wedding canopy of one of our daughters, and the bride’s chair of another.

I had seen how lovingly caregivers from India, the Philippines, and elsewhere take care of the elderly they serve, as I used to teach creative writing in the senior day center. So I told the ladies, “You, too, are all heroines.”

In 2018, I was invited as a journalist to a dinner honoring Rabbi Adin (Even-Israel) Steinsaltz, who has since passed away. My husband was also there, as he had studied under the rabbi, and both of us had worked for him decades ago in the Shefa Institute.

In the middle of the meal, a public relations person asked me if I’d like to interview one of the donors. Of course, I said. There were many she could have chosen, but she sent me an intriguing lady named Joelle Aflalo, a founding member of the Matanel Foundation (www.Matanel.org), an educational and social incubator that also supports Steinsaltz’s works.

I never mix roles, so even though, as the artistic director of Raise Your Spirits Theatre, I’m often reaching out to potential donors, I don’t do that if I’m wearing the hat of a journalist. (Though, since this story, I broke that rule one more time.)

In the middle of our interview, Joelle said, out of the blue, “I love women’s projects.” I hesitated for a moment, and thought of that old joke of a drowning man who kept saying, “God will save me…” “Hey,” says God when he sees him in heaven, “I sent you a raft, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter…”

So I told Joelle, “I direct a women’s theater group.” Her eyes lit up, she invited me to a gathering of their grantees, and since then, they have awarded us a grant for every production. Joelle was our helicopter.

But the acceptance process had changed. When, at the end of July 2025, I sent forms to the Matanel office about a show we’d be performing in mid-October, the answer I received from the administrator was that their board would only be reviewing the applications in three to six months.

Hmmm, I thought, in addition to our budgetary challenges, it would be too late for us to feature their name and logos on our playbill, like we always do, as per our past agreements. When I asked what we should do about that, the administrator said they could not guarantee we would receive the grant, and it is our decision regarding adding their logo to our show materials.

I drove home, opened my computer, and an email was waiting for me from the Matanel office that they had decided to give us the grant – almost a month earlier than their earliest board meeting.

I sent a note to Joelle telling her about the incredible coincidence. She wrote back, “Our lives are full of such stories. Rabbi Adin, of blessed memory, used to call me ‘serendipity.’ So, it does not surprise me.”

I always watch the inspiring Israel Prize ceremony on TV. This year, we were fortunate to receive tickets to the live event. Disclosure: The coveted tickets came from Chantal Belzberg of the OneFamily organization, who was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021, she and her husband, Marc, co-founded the organization, which is dedicated to supporting families of victims of terror and fallen soldiers.

Several moving synchronistic events proved to me, once again, what a small country we live in.

Inside the building, we stood on two long, slowly moving lines, with security people scrutinizing identity cards. After several people appeared to talk their way to the head of the line, I quietly mumbled something in annoyance.

The woman in front of me turned around, smiled warmly, and said, “We need to be patient. Maybe we were meant to be here together so we’d talk to each other. My name is Orly Weissman.” I introduced myself and my husband to her; it turned out they live in the same community as my sister-in-law. Let the Jewish geography roll.

I told her our daughter also lives in a nearby community, though I didn’t mention her name. I asked why she was there. She and her husband were invited by OneFamily, with whom they are involved, as their son was killed 10 years earlier in a terror attack.

After that I took a deep breath and kept my mouth shut, realizing that some of the people on those lines were there for a similar reason as Orly’s.

The ceremony took place before the backdrop of a large colorful electronic banner declaring, from the Book of Samuel II (1:23): “They were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions.” Ah, that lion metaphor, in Israel, never gets old.

Their story became legendary in Israel, as it was a time of great division.

Hila’s biological mother had died of cancer when she was a toddler, and Dov had remarried Rachel, a good friend of his deceased wife. Dov was a non-Orthodox, left-wing, Ashkenazi Tel Avivian, involved in journalism and PR.

Rachel, a medical researcher at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, was from an Iraqi Sephardi family that was deeply religious and right-wing. She raised Hila as her own, and she and Dov had two more children together.

All the couple had in common, on the surface, was their love for each other and the people of Israel.

Hila’s adoptive mother was the aunt of our son-in-law; my husband was a good friend of Dov’s.

In the parking lot at their double funeral, blue and orange ribbons flew side by side, like a mirror image of the people inside – religious and secular, Right and Left – mingling closely, joined by sorrow and love, the blue ribbons brought by those who approved of the expulsion from Gush Katif, the orange ones symbolizing those who opposed the evacuation.

OneFamily became like another family for Hila and her siblings. Belzberg said, “We saw that there was a small, quiet, gentle group of children who had lost both parents, and we realized that they needed something else. They don’t have parents waiting for them, who give them strength… we built a community for them.”

Tragically, that sub-group has grown. Hila said, “We have an incredible group of people, with differences in age, religious background, and political views, but there is a common denominator that holds us together, and gives us the ability to be there for each other, and support each other.”

At the Israel Prize ceremony, short videos were screened of the recipients. In Belzberg’s clip, she said: “A family is not just in the biological sense. It is also someone who comes and holds your hand, and tells you, ‘I am with you now. It is hard, but we will survive this together.’”

The judges wrote about Belzberg: “The organization currently supports more than 20,000 victims from across the country. During the events of October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel faced a large-scale trauma, [Belzberg] led the rapid establishment of a national emergency system that provided immediate assistance to thousands of families.”

Like OneFamily, it has groups and special events, programs, trips, gifts, financial help and more, appropriate for particular members of the family constellation – mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents, etc.

I knew about them, coincidentally, through Bryna and Sammy Hilburg, whose son, Yohanan, fell in battle in Lebanon in 1997. I had sat next to the Hilburgs only a few hours earlier, at the annual Independence Day barbecue of Bnei Akiva friends from my age group who have made aliyah. Bryna told me more about Irit several days later.

“She’s such a warm person… Every time Irit meets me, I get the feeling like, wow… she’s been waiting for me to come.” At the beginning of this war, Bryna said, Irit went to every family who had lost a child in the army.

“At some point, she said, ‘I can’t do it alone. I need help.’ So she turned to families that have been bereaved for many years now, and asked that we take a few families and just talk to them or listen to them.

“The first response [when I reached out] was sometimes, ‘Don’t call me. I’ll call you.’ But Irit said, ‘Don’t give up.’

“And I didn’t. Now I have some new friends, and it makes me feel good every time I talk to one of them. Most of the time, I’m just listening… It gives them somebody to talk to who has been through it, and who knows that life really does go on afterward, even if you don’t think it will.

“It makes me feel as if, in some small way, Yohanan is still alive.”

Education Minister Yoav Kisch said of Belzberg and Oren Gunders, “These women together are a beacon of compassion, mutual responsibility, and light. Their work reminds us all that Israeli society, at its best, is measured by its ability to embrace, support, and leave no one behind.” He noted that there are also other organizations that contributed to this critical field of work.

A Lifetime Achievement award in the new category of Young Leadership was given to Adi Altschuler, founder of the Krembo Wings youth movement for children and young adults with and without disabilities.

Kisch spoke emotionally about his late son, Matan, of blessed memory, who was “a wonderful child, a special child. At the age of one, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease that did not allow him to lead a normal life…

“It was a shock that shook our entire world… But Matan taught me a lesson for life – that pain was my pain, it was not his pain.

“Matan was a happy child, a joyful child. He loved to laugh, he loved people. And even though he did not know how to speak, he knew how to communicate. He was a member of the youth movement Krembo Wings.

“Thank you, Adi. You built a bridge where others saw only difficulty, and this is the Israeli human spirit at its best. A spirit of inclusion, of equality, and mutual responsibility.”

I found out a few days later that our 11-year-old granddaughter, who is not disabled, coincidentally, participates in the Krembo Wings youth movement.

Another friend said about him later, “He’s a big Torah scholar but doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s still in great physical condition. A pioneer at heart. I still see him walking around the neighborhood in khaki kibbutz shorts and a kova tembel (old-time Israeli kibbutz hat).”

On the Saturday night after the ceremony, I reread a column I had published three years earlier, entitled: “A Story Bridging Remembrance Day and Independence Day.” It was about our pregnant daughter, Ephrat, and son-in-law, Tzachi Cohen, who had decided to give the name “Yanai” to their expected boy. (Rabbi Yanai Hacohen was one of the “amoraim,” the rabbinic scholars who lived in 220-250 CE, in the Land of Israel.)

They had been watching a TV program on the eve of Remembrance Day which included the story of a soldier who, some years earlier, while off-duty and without a weapon, had been killed while trying to stop a terror attack in a supermarket.

His name was Tuvia Yanai Weissman. Ephrat was in the middle of contractions. Even though they had already chosen the name, Tzachi said that they were also happy that this child would continue the name of that heroic soldier.

My heart skipped a beat as I realized it was the same Yanai who was the son of Orly, whom I had met in line at the Israel Prize ceremony – a bereaved mother who taught me a lesson in patience. Orly, who smiled warmly as she said that maybe we were in line together because we were meant to meet and talk.

I called Orly and told her about our connection. She remembered that our children had given him the name Yanai, and told me there were other Yanais who were named for her son, as well.

Postscript: The daughter who had my mother’s sari draped over her bridal chair is the daughter who now has a son named Yanai. So even these “random” stories come full circle.

May we always be circled by blessings.