Remembering Our Fallen Soldiers

The Fellowship  |  January 21, 2025

International Fellowship of Christians and Jews logo
(Photo: Chaim Goldberg FLASH90)

Just days after the horrendous massacre of October 7, 2023, posters displaying the faces of the hostages taken to Gaza began appearing all over Israel’s cities and towns. Seeing the photos of the hostages so often engrained their faces in my mind and I began to feel like they are people I know although I never heard of any of them previously.

A few weeks later, another phenomenon began – memorial stickers. One day I was driving, and while making a left turn near my house, I noticed the smiling face of a soldier on a sticker pasted onto a pole outside my car window. I didn’t have time to read what was written on the sticker, but soon enough I began noticing similar stickers on bus stops, store windows, walls, and cars. On the bus shelter near my house, there are stickers with pictures of soldiers who fell in battle from my own city, Efrat. One was the son of my son’s kindergarten teacher from thirty years ago. Another was the grandson of the woman who sat across from me at an art workshop I attended a month after the war began, trying to get my mind away from the news.

Each sticker has a picture of the soldier and his or her name and sometimes date of birth and the date they fell in battle. Alongside the photo is an accompanying phrase that he or she once said or was inspired by. Many of our fallen soldiers were only 19 or 20 years old. Some were reserve soldiers in their thirties or forties with families. Each one was a story, a whole life, a future destroyed in an instant.

Lidor Makais was nineteen years old when he was killed on October 7. His quote is, “As long as someone remembers me, I exist.” How true are these words! As of January 14, 2025, 840 soldiers have fallen in the Swords of Iron War. Some of the youngest soldiers who fell in battle enlisted after the war had already begun – they went through their army training and were immediately sent into the inferno.

In Jerusalem, I saw the sticker created in memory of Dr. Eitan Menachem Na’aman, 44, a senior physician in the pediatric emergency room of Soroka Hospital in Beersheva. On October 7 he was at the hospital treating the injured when the army called him at 11 a.m. He was killed on the Gaza border two days later. Dr. Na’aman’s memorial sticker has the following quote: What I ask of you: that you should love each other and respect each other. These important words, which we all should heed, were taken from a book of midrash* from the tenth century.

I have been stopping to read these stickers for a long time, praying all along that there will not be any new ones because no more soldiers will be killed. I began thinking of writing about the stickers and decided to search Google for “soldiers’ memorial stickers” to see if anyone else has ever thought to write about this unique way to memorialize IDF soldiers.

Jeff Weiss, an author and entrepreneur, made aliyah only a few years ago and was apparently as intrigued and drawn to the memorial stickers as I am, so he decided to create a website called Stickers of Meaning. On his site is written, “Realizing that these stickers might eventually disappear, Jeff started photographing them – not just for himself, but with the understanding that their messages need to be shared with others. This project is his way of ensuring that these ideas live on.” I would like to add, although it is certainly obvious, that Jeff’s website is a way to ensure that we remember the precious soldiers who gave their lives for the security of the State of Israel, for whom these ideas were so meaningful.

Halavai (הלואי) is a word in Hebrew often used when one has a wish and a hope that something will happen. It is usually translated as “if only.” I will end with this word – halavai that no more soldiers will fall in battle so that Jeff Weiss’s website will not have to grow. May their memories be blessed.

Miriam Lock

January 2025

*Midrash: a genre of Jewish literature that interprets and elaborates on biblical texts.