Capt. Danit Silber has been on duty for almost two months. An IDF reservist, she dropped everything to answer her country’s call on Oct. 7, showing up on base three hours after getting an urgent phone call that fateful afternoon.
That means she is almost two months away from her two toddlers, a son, age 4, and a daughter, age 2. But Capt. Silber knew this was the price she might one day have to pay.
She volunteered to stay in Israel’s reserves even though mothers and pregnant women are exempt from further reserve duty.
Her husband, Yishai, has her back. Not in the reserves, he’s home with the kids, juggling a job, childcare, and domestic duties.
Capt. Silber has some one- or two-day liberties when she’s gotten to come home and reconnect with her family.
She’s been a reservist for 18 years since finishing her regular army service in 2005. That’s mostly meant going in for a few days, occasionally as long as two weeks. Usually, she’s given advance notice, up to two months, if the army is going to need her more than three days.
This was different.
“We were watching TV. We were watching all the horrible news that was going on,” Capt. Silber said. “And my commander called. I think he called me at two or three o‘clock. And by six o’clock in the evening, I was on base.”
She doesn’t keep a go bag ready, she said. “But I know what I need to take with me.”
She had six hours to get there because, she said, people can get almost anywhere in Israel in six hours. She is based in northern Israel, closer to the Lebanese border and the Hezbollah threat than to Gaza.
“I always knew this could happen,” she said. “My husband always knew that that’s going to happen.
“It’s a matter of pros and cons. I know my kids are okay. I know my kids are well taken care of. They might be missing their mother, but hopefully they'll, at some point, understand that this was for the greater good.”
“It’s important, and if push comes to shove one day, unfortunately, in the country that we live in, it might be an option, they'd also have to make that choice. And if it were my daughter, I would support her making the same choice.”
“I’ve seen my kids. I’ve been home. It’s not that they haven’t seen me for (almost two months.) I talk to them, I chat, we have video chats.
“It’s difficult; it’s hard for me, I know they miss me too, but in the greater picture, I think it’s okay.”
Capt. Silber is in charge of manpower for her unit and has done some variant of that job for about 10 years.
“It’s basically keeping track of who’s where, knowing which vehicle they’re in, how many people are in it. In my previous position, I was in a tank battalion. And it was my job to keep track of which crew members are in which tank, making sure no one switches, because if, God forbid, something happens to the tank, I need to know who the soldiers were on it. If, God forbid, something happens to the crew members. I need to know who they are.”
Her unit now is a little less combat-oriented, and the soldiers going in and out are doing it in trucks and armored personnel carriers. Her team provides logistical support to the headquarters of four different battalions, providing them with equipment from supply depots, from weapons to food and uniforms.
Capt. Silber said she knows one other mother in her unit, a woman who’s also pregnant right now. What she’s doing isn’t uncommon, she said. Her unit just isn’t very big.
She estimated that from 30 to 40 percent of female reservists now volunteer to remain in even after they have children. A Facebook group for IDF reserve women has thousands of members, of which she guesses the majority have children, she said.
There are more women in combat roles now, including combat leadership roles, she said. Israel promoted its first female brigadier general in 1986. Its first female fighter pilot earned her wings in 2001.
Women have always served in Israel’s army, their roles changing with the nation’s needs. When the country declared independence in 1948 and was simultaneously attacked by five Arab armies, they needed every person who could hold a gun.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the well-known TV sex therapist, had an unusual distinction. A Holocaust orphan standing only 4-foot-7, she trained as a sniper during the 1948 war because the army saw that she was a good shot.
After the war, women reverted to primarily support roles such as clerks, drivers, and radio operators, replacing men to serve in combat roles. Jewish women are drafted for a two-year stint. Orthodox women often do alternative national service.
Women attained greater equality in the military in 2000 with the passage of the Women’s Equal Rights Law. By 2011, 88 percent of military positions were open to women, and 69 percent of those positions actually had women serving in them. From 1962 to 2016, according to online sources, 535 female soldiers were killed in the course of their service.
Still, only 4 percent of female soldiers were in combat positions, such as infantry or pilots, as of 2014, the IDF reported then.
Her mother, Juliet Mandelzweig, told The Epoch Times of her daughter’s sudden departure after receiving what Israelis call a “tzav shmona” (command eight), the urgent request to drop everything and report immediately.
Later, she said, “We were laughing, a little bit of humor when she showed me the text that she sent—when she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be home today. This might take a day or two.' ”
Capt. Silber’s older brother Gilon is also in the reserves and left his wife and their three children to report to the Gaza border. He’s over 40 but volunteered to go, Capt. Silber said.
“I know that I’m her mom,” Ms. Mandelzweig said. “But I take my hat off to her.”
“I said, if you‘d have known that this would have gone on for as long as it has, would your response have been any different? And she said, ’Absolutely not.' ”
“We’re a strong nation,” Ms. Mandelzweig said. And I know from my daughter, who’s got such a fiery personality, and she’s so strong, and she’s got so much to contribute. And I think it’s fair that they’re allowed to do their part. I really do.”
Back at their home in Tzufim, a Jewish yishuv or settlement, just inside the West Bank, Yishai Silber has adapted to a routine: Work at his sales and marketing job with a tech start-up company. Come home. Get dinner on the table for the kids. Bathtime. Bedtime.
They talk to their mother on video chat most nights at a quarter to seven.
Mr. Silber was never the primary caregiver, he told The Epoch Times. His wife was. She was home for a few years when they had children and then with the pandemic, but went back to work in 2022. In the financial department of a tech firm, she works “mother’s hours,” a shortened schedule from 8 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon.
He’s had some practice, though, each time his wife did reserve duty. “We joked that when she’s doing her training, I’m doing my training as well.”
Mr. Silber isn’t in the reserves because he was never in the military. He suffered from depression as a teenager, couldn’t qualify for combat as he wanted, and ended up not serving.
Serving in the IDF is seen as a nation-building activity in Israel, particularly for immigrants like himself. He came with his family from South Africa—where Danit was also born—when he was 14. His lack of military service hasn’t hurt his work opportunities.
“It’s never held me back. But right now, I’m feeling it very much. I have friends that are (out of) army service, and they’ve put their uniforms back on” and voluntarily re-entered the army. “And family members who have done the same thing.
“I know that what I’m doing is important. Looking after the kids and maintaining the house is important, but I’m feeling very, very useless. I look around me, I mean, my wife included, I look around me, and I’m surrounded by heroes, honestly.”
He does get to experience it through her eyes, he said.
Where they live weighed on him initially. On Oct. 8, he took the kids and went to his parents’ house in Ra'anana, north of Tel Aviv. No one had any idea what would happen in the West Bank; the Arab city near Tzufim, Qalqilya, is sometimes restive.
“We weren’t sure if we were going to see Oct. 7 repeated here. And I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.”
“It’s the first time I slept with a knife under my pillow,” he said. “I said to myself, you know, if you’re already sleeping with a knife under your pillow, remove yourself from the situation.”
They stayed in Ra'anana for about two weeks until schools reopened.
“Surprisingly, the West Bank has not been as volatile as we all feared it would be.”
He’s found the neighborhood supportive of him as he’s been thrust into a primary caregiver role. Local women message him every week to see if he needs help grocery shopping, and they deliver hot meals once a week.
“It’s not that I need it. I’m coping with the workload, but it’s nice to be acknowledged.”
The children are adapting but feel their mother’s absence, he said.
“They’re doing okay. It’s not that they’re unscathed. They understand something is not right. And they’re dealing with it.”
“It’s most apparent to me when I put them down to bed. That’s when they look for Mommy.”
Normally, she hums them an African lullaby called “Tula Baba”, which means “hush, baby,” as part of their bedtime routine. But he doesn’t want to replace her, so he learned the words and now sings them instead. Humming is mommy’s thing.
Bedtime has become more straightforward, Mr. Silber said. His wife will sit there, nurture them, hum for them, and wait until they fall asleep. With him, “we get into bed, read a story, sing a lullaby, and that’s it.”
“I try to explain to them, you know, Ima (mommy) is a soldier, and soldiers protect people, and Ima got called up to go and protect people. And that’s the conversation that we have.”
Early on, they were crying every night. Now they’re more used to it. The nightly video chats have helped a lot in calming them down.
Mr. Silber described “a bittersweet moment” last week. His daughter fell, scraped her knee, and called for her father. Calling her mother had always been her default, he said.
“I’m like, okay, she trusts me, she’s looking for me. But on the other hand, honestly, I’ve replaced Danit as the caregiver; I’ve kind of replaced her at the moment. So it’s a lot of mixed feelings.”
His wife, home one weekend, worried aloud that she almost felt like a stranger, as he and the children have their own routines.
“I said to her, babe, you shouldn’t feel like a stranger. All I’m doing is maintaining what you’ve put in place and put my own flavor to it.”
