Silent casualties
The Jerusalem Post
- April 19, 2007
by
LAUREN GELFOND FELDINGER
Women who lost their boyfriends in action in Lebanon are
ineligible for IDF-run bereavement services. They join
scores of almost wives and unmarried partners in mourning
from every war who have struggled to find their place in the
circle of bereavement
The caller ID was flashing the
name of a friend from her boyfriend Ido's unit, someone she had
just phoned but not reached.
Yael Girafy clicked the green button on her cellphone and said
"Hello," relieved that she would get some news about him. Since
he crossed the border into Lebanon with his tank unit the
previous day, she hadn't been able to reach him.
"Yaeli?" an unfamiliar voice answered.
She listened, blinked a few times and her mouth fell open. And
then she started to scream.
"Ido is dead," the caller had said.
It was that abrupt call on a Saturday evening last August when
the 19-year-old learned that her boyfriend, St.-Sgt. Ido
Grabovsky, 20, had been killed by a Hizbullah anti-tank missile
in southern Lebanon's Wadi Saluki.
She didn't personally know the caller, a soldier from
Grabovsky's unit, who briefly answered a couple of questions,
then hung up.
After the funeral, the cease-fire one day later and sitting
shiva with the family, Girafy returned to her intensive
officers' training course.
Memories of him laughing competed with haunting flashes of the
past week, creating a psychological noise in her head that
knocked the instructor's voice right out of her ears.
"I couldn't concentrate," she explains. "All of a sudden there's
a war, Lebanon, Hizbullah, he's dead and I'm left in my regular
world."
Still, as an officer-in-training and now as an officer proper,
she has to wear a mask of strength that her superiors do not see
or acknowledge, she says. "They didn't talk to me about it,
understand me or help me personally."
At home, she also feels alone with her grief. From the moment
the traditional 30-day mourning period came to an end, her phone
started ringing. Her teenage peers urged her back into a social
life of parties, pubs and nightclubs, echoing the words of
well-meaning family members that it was time to start moving on.
After declining offer after offer, friends, even close friends,
stopped calling, and family members stopped talking about it,
too, says Girafy: "They don't understand and they don't know
what to do."
An officer expecting his first child and another soldier engaged
to be married were with her boyfriend in his tank when the
missile struck, Girafy says, explaining why people don't take
her grief as seriously. "I'm 'just' a girlfriend. Maybe if I
wasn't in the army, if I were older or if we were together
longer, people would take me more seriously. But I ignore all
that - I'm dealing with death and loss."
THE ATTITUDE that young women whose boyfriends are killed in
action should have a faster and easier grieving process because
of their age and single status is misguided, says Phyllis
Heimowitz, who together with her eldest daughter, Tamar, founded
the Non-Profit Organization for the Emotional Support of
Girlfriends of Fallen Soldiers of the IDF.
Heimowitz understands the grief of bereaved girlfriends, since
her daughter Michal's fiance, Lt. Avi Book, 22, was killed in
southern Lebanon in 1997, while checking if his soldiers were
safe and in position during a Hizbullah mortar attack. During
the shiva, four months before the couple was to be married,
family friends tried to comfort Heimowitz by telling her there
was no need to worry, since her daughter was so young and had
her whole life in front of her.
"They didn't understand," she explains. "Her entire world
collapsed; we felt we lost her. We too suffered terribly. She
changed. And even though we're a very loving, close family, we
felt she needed help. We turned to the Defense Ministry to ask
it to establish support groups for the bereaved girlfriends
[like the one it has for bereaved wives]. The answer was 'no.'
"We were only looking for emotional, not financial support.
There are hundreds of people in the army who deal with
bereavement, but bereaved girlfriends were considered zero. Even
if the girlfriend lived with the soldier, she was still not
eligible for any emotional help from the IDF or Defense
Ministry."
According to the ministry, all army bereavement services are
based on a series of laws, the first passed in 1950, for war
widows, including the common-law partners of fallen soldiers.
Today, a team of IDF officers, including one with expertise in
bereavement counseling, is sent to alert and support the widow
after her husband's death. A bereavement expert continues to be
available to offer support, liaison and information, free
state-sponsored counseling, support groups and financial
assistance. There are also services for orphans, siblings and
parents.
Serious girlfriends and fiancees, though, are not officially
informed of a partner's death, and may hear via a phone call or
on the news. They are not entitled to counseling or the support
groups.
Under religious law, a Jewish girlfriend does not sit shiva
because she is not family, and thus may not be greeted or
acknowledged by guests as an official mourner. She may feel left
out of the mourning process and may even require special
permission from work, university or the army to attend the shiva.
She is certainly not expected to embrace a long mourning period.
When Heimowitz realized that neither the IDF nor the Defense
Ministry could help her daughter - and the dozens of other girls
like her - she and Tamar, a lawyer, turned to Tzafra Dweck, a
ministry rehabilitation and bereavement expert. She encouraged
the family to start a support system themselves and provided
them with a list of specially trained IDF bereavement officers,
who agreed to pass on the names of any girlfriends who gave
permission to be contacted.
In November 1997, 10 weeks after Book's death, the Heimowitzes
launched Israel's first private support group for 10 bereaved
girlfriends, including Michal. Tamar was clerking for lawyer
Aharon Aharoni, who raised the money to pay the salary of the
group's leader, a clinical social worker.
In 1998, the family met with IDF officers again, this time to
make a case that the army should provide girlfriends with
rights.
"It was a moral question," says Heimowitz. "It was the period of
Lebanon, soldiers fell almost every day. We decided that the IDF
and Defense Ministry and the whole country have a moral
obligation to take care of the girlfriends psychologically.
That's what the soldiers would have wanted. That's what we owe
the soldiers."
The IDF eventually agreed to pay a clinical social worker's
salary to head a support group for bereaved girlfriends, on
condition the group register as a non-profit organization. It
also agreed to pass the name of every known girlfriend or
boyfriend who survived a fallen soldier. "This was the first
time in the history of the IDF that girlfriends began to be
recognized as part of the bereaved family and as entitled to its
help," says Heimowitz.
In 1998, the Organization for Emotional Support of Girlfriends
of Fallen Soldiers of the IDF was officially registered, founded
in memory of Lt. Avi Book. The free, year-long support group met
weekly for girlfriends and boyfriends of any religion,
ethnicity, age and sexual orientation, whose partner died during
IDF service, regardless of the cause of death.
But as soldiers kept falling, the ministry grant wasn't enough.
In May 2002, after Operation Defensive Shield, the US-based Ziv
Tzedakah Fund signed on to fund two new support groups opened
that month for 20 additional girlfriends. In 2003, during the
Second Intifada, the US-based non-profit Hands On Tzedakah also
signed on as major supporters. Later, the Defense Ministry
tripled its support. As a result, there have been 18 support
groups to date plus, most recently, a guidance group for
parents.
Two of the support groups, in Haifa and Tel Aviv, are
specifically for bereaved partners of soldiers who fell in
Lebanon last summer. Twenty-five of the 43 bereaved girlfriends
signed on. Others who can't participate physically get support
by telephone.
An overall theme, says Heimowitz, is that unmarried partners in
mourning feel additional pain and pressure because they feel
misunderstood and unsupported.
SOCIETY DOESN'T understand the mourning process of unmarried
partners, says clinical psychologist Ofri Bar-Nadav.
A specialist in mourning and bereavement, he has just concluded
but not yet published four years of doctoral research at the
University of Haifa on young women and partner loss. His study
found that the grieving process for girlfriends is almost
identical to that of childless wives.
"I rarely found any differences," he says. "They both face
depression, anxiety, trouble concentrating at work, trouble
socially. They mourn deeply, yearn for their partners, want them
back, talk about them all the time and actively grieve."
The study explains that the intensity and length of grief is not
necessarily correlated to marital status or length of time with
a partner. "The status of being married or not has little to do
with bereavement itself, except for the legitimization it gives
a person in society, which in turn can help a person get social
support and recover," says Bar-Nadav.
"The younger you are, the more people tell you you'll get over
it and it doesn't leave room for bereavement and grief; they
feel like they have to defend themselves and their grief. That's
overwhelming and makes them feel worse, because their feelings
are not being legitimized. Girlfriends of soldiers are usually
very young, very vulnerable, and anyone trying to help them has
to know that younger women are vulnerable to self-esteem and
identity issues."
He also found that the pain of remembering the partner for both
girlfriends and wives does not go away over time. "They maintain
relationships with the deceased years later, remember their
feelings, have anger at him for leaving," Bar-Nadav says. "He
still influences their emotional life."
One reason that mourning is similar for girlfriends and wives is
that societal rules about relationships are different than in
the past. "Today when you are in a serious relationship, you may
live together. You share many things in your life that you
couldn't share before," he explains. "In ordinary day-to-day
life, being a girlfriend is not that different from being a wife
as it once was. What makes a bigger difference is having
children together."
Israeli society is also unique in dealing with bereavement
because of Jewish tradition and religion. "The one-year
bereavement period, for example, is a myth," Bar-Nadav says.
"There is no time limit. Israeli society is very sensitive to
loss and bereavement on one hand, but on the other hand, society
has become less patient and less generous to the different ways
in which people mourn. In my opinion girlfriends and widows need
to go through the process at their own pace, without being
labeled disordered. They need patience, support and
understanding because the road is long and bumpy."
THE ROAD is so long for bereaved girlfriends, that every
Remembrance Day, the Organization for the Emotional Support of
Girlfriends of Fallen Soldiers of the IDF gets phone calls from
women who are still coping with the effects of a boyfriend's
death from every Israeli war.
Rina Kahan lost her 22-year-old fianc during the Yom Kippur War
in 1973, when she was 19. Nearly three decades after his death,
Kahan was watching a Remembrance Day television special and saw
a bereaved girlfriend talking about the support groups. She
immediately picked up the phone to volunteer. Today she runs the
organization together with Phyllis and Tamar Heimowitz.
"I am 100 percent sure that if there had been such a group in my
day everything would have been easier for me. I was in so much
pain and felt so alone then," she says. "For the longest time I
would start crying out of the blue and not know why. I thought
maybe I was mentally ill. But when you meet other women in the
same situation, and you meet a psychologist who is an expert in
mourning, they all tell you that this is normal. I didn't know
that then."
Now Kahan helps pass along this message, even to bereaved women
who don't attend the support groups. "Every year on Remembrance
Day a woman who lost her boyfriend in the Six Day War calls me
for one hour; she still needs to talk," she says. "Another
called recently because she lost her boyfriend in action, and
now that her children are going off to the army she is afraid
and needs to talk about it."
Kahan, happily married with children, says the bereaved and
later their spouses must accept that the process of remembering
and commemorating is lifelong. "I and all my friends who lost
boyfriends in the Yom Kippur War still go to the grave every
year on Remembrance Day. Most also stay in touch with the
families of the boyfriend. It's just part of your life."
A special support group opened in 2002 for women who lost their
boyfriends in the early 1990s, before the organization was
founded, and felt they had not grieved properly. Another group
for old-timers may also open in the future.
"It still hurts when you remember, even after all these years,"
explains Kahan. "That never goes away. And after such a trauma
you have to learn who you are again, because you are a different
person."
But nothing is like the first years, she emphasizes. "Some girls
are suicidal; all are frightened. Its very hard for them to talk
with their families and friends; they have so much anger and
don't know where to direct it. They feel alone. And they don't
want to move on - they still feel like the girlfriend and don't
want to 'cheat.'"
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER her boyfriend's funeral, Girafy still keeps
her grieving private. But on a recent afternoon, she agrees to
talk to a journalist for the first time.
Arriving to Jerusalem from her IDF base on the northern border,
she shoves her rifle out of the way, and brushes her kissed
fingers over the mezuza. Once seated, she stares, blinking, at
the sleeves of her uniform for a moment and then pushes her
index fingers into the corners of her eyes.
"I try not to cry," she says. "Society expects me not to cry
anymore. Everyone expects me to be 'normal.'"
She flips through a pocket photo album and journal about
Grabovsky, plastered with his motto, "We are free." "I knew he
was special the first time I met him. I knew he was the one,"
she says. "He loved everyone, worried about everyone, accepted
everyone."
She affectionately fingers Grabovsky's dog tags and photo,
wrapped in the insignia of his unit, that she still wears as a
necklace outside her uniform. "I can't stop thinking about him,"
she says. "I'm afraid if I do, I will forget something."
She is also racked with questions: "Am I mad at the army or the
war? There is something to that. His death was so unnecessary.
So many people died and two days later there was a cease-fire,
and they knew there was going to be a cease-fire, so you ask
yourself, did they have to stay?
"But I met Ido in the army. The army took him from me - but the
army also gave him to me. If I had to choose between never
meeting him and suffering this pain, I would never give up
meeting him.
"I don't know. Maybe he died so someone else could live. Would
it have been better if he died in a car accident? Every death is
meaningless."
She stares at her sleeves again. "We didn't choose to break up.
We talked about marriage. Now I will never know what was
supposed to happen."
When Girafy attended the first support group for young people
whose boyfriends died in Lebanon, she said it was a relief to
finally meet other people who knew what she was feeling. But at
home and in the army, she stays silent, she explains. Her long
trip by bus to Jerusalem to meet The Jerusalem Post is a break
from her silence, but one with an objective.
"I wish my officers and friends and family would read an article
and understand how it feels to be in mourning, and to know that
what Ido and I had was serious," she says. "I would tell people:
'Don't distance yourselves from me. If I don't want to go out,
so come be with me at home. Keep calling. And don't give up on
me, even when it's hard."
She hums a bar from Shania Twain's "You're Still the One." It
was a song she played for her boyfriend after they made up from
their first fight, not long before he was killed.
"We knew we should be together," she says. "I played him that
song because I tried to imagine my life without him... and I
couldn't."
