For lone soldiers, or people who venture from another nation to join the Israel Defense Forces, the journey to fight for the Jewish state is not an easy one. The IDF takes care of lone soldiers as it does all of its members, but what about the family members who stand behind those fighters, often from a great distance?
Friends of the IDF, an organization that fundraises for and supports members of Israel’s armed forces, makes a point to support the parents, siblings and other relatives who help lone soldiers, a job that has only gotten more intense in the last few years.
The organization doesn’t name the parents and families they help, and recently even stopped showing faces of lone soldiers they support at their galas and events, to protect their privacy.
Mollie Sharfman, regional development associate for the FIDF MidAtlantic Region, said that while the mission is more difficult than it was before the recent war with Hamas, it is too important to abandon.
“Lone soldiers are a very special thing. Someone has chosen to join the army, and that usually means their family is not with them. It’s hard for them, but it’s also hard for the parents who are so far away. In Israel, there is this culture of loving the soldiers, and we wanted to create that for the parents here,” Sharfman said.
This support takes a number of different forms. FIDF offers care packages to soldiers and plans events for the parents to meet each other. They help coordinate and fund flights home on holidays for the soldiers, or alternatively, flights to Israel for the parents and families. FIDF, with help from a group of Israeli women, helps garner thank you notes from school children for the families, and Sharfman said she even takes walks with some parents just to help them get their minds off of the conflict and danger their child is in.
FIDF has been supporting lone soldier parents going back to the organization’s founding in 1981, but that work has been scaled up since Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel was attacked by Hamas and the Gaza war started. Since then, antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States has been on the rise, which means that FIDF needs to be more careful than before.
“We always get our protocols from the IDF. We have our own security. We don’t share locations [of events]. We used to be able to show the faces of the soldiers at our galas, but we stopped,” Sharfman said. “We keep it private, as we just have to keep it to this level. I think it’s more sad than anything else, because there’s so much pride, and we should be able to share this.”
While FIDF coordinates some activities with the IDF, all of their work is on the civilian side of things — as in, they don’t donate funds for weapons or anything to do with the war itself, save for things like uniform boots.
Josh Mauer, longtime FIDF board member, previous FIDF chairman and current Lone Soldier Parent Committee Head, explained that, while things have become more complex since October 2023, the organization has also seen more support from the Jewish community.
“Our basic mission is, we are a fundraising organization, so I think that we’ve raised a lot of money in the last few years that we can use to help the soldiers, which since the war, people have been just so generous because they can’t do anything except give money or give time,” he said.
In addition to Israeli students who write letters and care for the soldiers and their families, American students do too. In fact, those efforts have taken hold at Krieger Schechter Day School in Pikesville, where teacher Hasia Cohen has helped her students write letters.
At a recent FIDF event for parents of lone soldiers, Sharfman saw strong camaraderie among the local community and those who go to fight for Israel.
“Here in Maryland we’ve built something incredibly special: a community of parents who support one another,” she said.
Mauer said it is impossible to solve every problem that the soldiers and their families encounter, but that won’t stop FIDF from trying.
“We’re trying to be able to address as many of them as we can. We’re always going to fall short. The needs are always going to be greater than our capacity to meet them, but that’s our goal — to raise the bar high and to try to get as close to it as possible,” he said.
