When Tal Vered finally walked through the door after a month of military reserve duty, his wife, Dikla, thought she knew what would happen next. The children would jump on him, and she would hand over the house. For a few days, he would take charge so that she could catch her breath.
It did not work that way.
“At first it was very technical,” Vered recently told The Jerusalem Report. “He comes home, and you throw everything on him – the tasks, the kids, ‘I need air.’ And then you realize it’s impossible. He comes out of war; he needs 24 hours of sleep.”
Vered, a VP at Manpower Group Israel, a company that specializes in management consulting and training, had just spent weeks running what she calls her “war routine”: waking before dawn, walking the dog – who was rescued from Kibbutz Re’im on the Gaza border – checking the daily list of fallen soldiers, holding down her job, and caring for two anxious children on her own.
“Cry, release, put on a painted smile, go wake the kids with a kiss,” she recounted.
Husband, Tal, a reservist officer, spent months on the frontline following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre. When he returned, husband and wife found themselves living in “parallel universes”: Him desperate to be home. Her not wanting to be in the house.
Across the country, more than 300,000 reservists have been called up since the war started, many for repeated and extended tours. Families have had to absorb the absence – and then the return – of a parent or partner with almost no guidance on how to cope.
One of the few places that has been thinking about this problem long before the current war is B’shvil Hamachar (Path for Tomorrow), an Israeli nonprofit that runs nature-based group healing journeys to help combat soldiers and reservists process their war experiences and build resilience.
Founded after the Second Lebanon war in 2006, B’shvil Hamachar has spent 16 years running multi-day “healing journeys” for combat reservists, combining group work, guided reflection, and nature.
For most of that time, the focus was entirely on the soldiers themselves. Since October 7, however, the organization has adapted its model for the home front, working with partners of reservists who are living their own version of the war.
“We know how to call them to war,” said Lavi Zamir, the organization’s CEO and a veteran reservist himself, but “we don’t know how to bring them back.”
The second front
The gap is obvious: the army prepares soldiers to leave, but no one prepares their families for what happens when they return.
Throughout the past two years, Shlomit Efrat, a senior facilitator at B’shvil Hamachar, heard the same story repeated in different homes. “He wants to go there. She wants him to stay…she needs to keep it together. She’s the commander of the house.”
Over long months of reserve duty, many spouses discovered they could manage more than they imagined: school runs, bedtime, finances, repairs, decisions that used to be shared. Partners, meanwhile, came back as different people.
“Something about the contract has changed,” Efrat noted. “He changed; I changed as well. When he comes back home now and then, it’s destructive for the balance.”
The first Zoom
The turning point for spouses came in the first weeks after October 7, when journeys were suddenly halted, and many facilitators found themselves “grounded,” unsure how to help.
Efrat and her colleagues began hosting open Zoom sessions for wives of reservists. A Facebook post invited them to log on that evening; hundreds did. Every night, five parallel calls ran with about twenty women in each.
One meeting “is just to normalize and to have a chance to share feelings, fears,” Efrat explained.
The second taught them how to become self-help groups.
The Zoom experiment revealed that the home front itself was in danger of collapse.
Vered joined the very first wives’ pilot meeting after a disaster in her husband’s battalion, when a building collapsed in January 2024, killing five of his comrades. The unit had already been on a B’shvil Hamachar rehabilitation journey; one of the facilitators suggested a parallel process for their spouses.
“This was the first time I was in a place where I could talk,” Vered said.
The women flew abroad together for an intensive retreat. For the first time since October 7, Vered felt someone was taking care of her rather than the other way around.
In days spent moving between circles of chairs and walks outside, “slowly, layers start peeling,” she said. “You discover that within all these differences, there are so many similarities. You receive tools… how to survive long periods of crisis, how to process and come out stronger.”
What surprised her most was the bond that formed. The WhatsApp group that began on that first day is now, she says, her most active chat.
“Connections were formed that can never be broken,” she said. “It’s for life.”
Teaching family resilience
Back home, the real test is not the reflective circle in the forest but the kitchen table on a weekday morning.
Efrat described the gap in expectations between returning soldiers after months on the front line and their wives, who are waiting for someone to finally do the school run and bedtime. Children who have learned to manage with one parent suddenly erupt in anger or clinginess that masks fear and love.
In earlier, shorter wars, families could focus only on the reunion, said Zamir. But they have been away for so long this time, “that you couldn’t hold the anger, the shame, the frustration anymore.”
“No one can understand you because they haven’t lived it,” Vered said. “My circles of friends couldn’t understand me in the war. The only ones who understood me were the women going through the same thing.”
A national responsibility
Zamir believes the country is still “in trauma,” not post-trauma, and warns that the coming decade will be defined by how Israel deals with that fact.
Vered, speaking as both a manager and a reservist’s wife, frames it as a civic obligation. After two years in which her husband has been in and out of uniform, she wants the state to recognize the cost – emotional, financial, and professional – carried by families like hers.
“A reservist who served two years in the war cannot be harmed in the workplace or in his career promotion. And neither can the reservist’s wife,” she stated. “Our time is worth money, and we gave two years that cost us a fortune – in actual money and in careers – and in mental health, for us and the kids.”
She points to small bureaucratic encounters, as places where the state could signal that these families matter. “The state must care for these circles forever,” she said. “We have so much to do. B’shvil HaMahar should be replicated – for every regular soldier, career soldier, and reservist – and every woman behind them.”
According to research, half of combat soldiers are estimated to recover from war without significant symptoms, 35% will experience partial post-traumatic symptoms, and 15% will develop full PTSD.
Whether those scars deepen or heal will depend not only on what happens in clinics and army bases, but in kitchens and playgrounds – in the quiet work done by women like Vered and the groups that support them.■