An Israeli Reservist’s Wife on the Anguish at Home

On October 8, 2023, in a massive mobilization, 130,000 Israeli reservists showed up for duty on the border with Gaza. Over the course of the broader national emergency call-up, Israel ultimately mobilized 360,000 reservists. Many of them have reported for multiple call-ups; others, who were not called up so frequently, nonetheless insisted on going to war again and again to defend their country. The war has been hard on the families left behind. One reservist’s wife, Roni Friedman, whose husband Yitzy has volunteered to serve his sixth round of fighting, has given a remarkable interview to the Jerusalem Post about what her husband’s time away fighting the war has meant for her, her children, and for him. Her complete interview can be found here: “The war inside Israel’s reserve families: ‘To him, defending the border protects our family,'” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, June 12, 2026:

‘The tension between us was real when Yitzy said he was signing up for his sixth round of reserve duty. For me, it’s my family first, then nation and border. But he believes that by going to the border, he is defending his family here in Jerusalem. It was like that for him in his first round of reserve duty, and it’s still like that with his sixth.”

When Yitzy Friedman received a call-up notice for the reserves on October 7, 2023, his wife, Roni, watched him pack his things and leave within minutes.

Nearly three years later, as Yitzy serves in a sixth round of reserve duty, Roni is preparing to give birth to their fourth child while also wrestling with the cost of her husband’s decision to serve. She spoke to The Jerusalem Post about the tension between family obligations and national service.

Roni grew up in Petah Tikva, one of three siblings in a “religious but open” family. Today, she is a team lead in the Tel Aviv office of an American hi-tech company.

Prior to working in hi-tech, she worked in the public sector for over a decade (with MK Uri Orbach, the Jerusalem Municipality, and the Student Union), but said she is better suited to her current job as she “loves connecting people, whether around a product, or around technology, or around values.”…

Despite everything, this reservist’s wife is holding on, keeping a semblance of normalcy at home for their three, soon to be four, small children, despite moments of understandable exhaustion, fright, and anger at the situation that keeps her husband going back, like so many Israeli men in the reserves, to fight outside the borders of Israel, in Gaza and Lebanon, in order to defend his family and the other people living in the permanently imperiled Jewish state. And she has managed to keep those feelings hidden from her children. She perseveres. It is her duty to do so, for she is serving, too.