When Hadas Levy received a phone call in December 2023 informing her that her fiancé, Capt. (res.) Netanel Silberg, 33, had been killed in combat in Gaza, she screamed for about 20 minutes. Then, she said, she began begging his mother to request the removal and preservation of his sperm postmortem.
“I just started begging, ‘Please, please, please, don’t say no, please, please, please, please, please, please.’ I remember saying ‘please’ a lot,” Levy, a pediatrician, recalled during a recent interview with The Jerusalem Report.
“I have no idea where it came from… I’m a very practical person, and I always think ahead, but to tell you how I thought of doing this, I just don’t know. It still doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Levy, who in June last year became the first woman in Israel to give birth to a baby whose father was killed in the war against Hamas, using posthumous sperm removal (PSR).
“It wasn’t that I had decided to even use it [his sperm] at that point, I just knew that I wanted to have the possibility of having his child,” she said.
Rise in requests
While PSR has been legal in Israel since 2003, a lengthy and complicated legal process, as well as multiple ethical questions, have made its implementation difficult. Only in a handful of cases has a baby actually been born from the harvested sperm, and mostly to surrogate mothers on behalf of the dead man’s parents.
However, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, in which hundreds of young men were brutally murdered, and the ensuing war, in which some 900 IDF soldiers have been killed in combat so far, there has been a sharp increase in the number of families requesting sperm retrieval postmortem.
An easing of regulations and procedural changes since the start of the war has allowed for sperm removal without court approval. According to Israel’s Health Ministry, some 250 families have had their loved ones’ sperm retrieved and stored.
Preparing for a baby
Levy said that at Netanel’s shiva (seven-day mourning period), she had already started thinking about having his child, and even spoke with his mother to share her decision.
“I told her, ‘I’m going to do this.’ And, of course, she said, ‘No. You’re going to find someone else, you’re going to get married and have children with someone else,’” Levy recounted. “I said, ‘Well, maybe I will find someone else, and maybe I will get married and have another man’s children, but I’m also having Netanel’s child,’” she recounted.
“I think she didn’t want to put pressure on me to do it,” she reflected, “but I do think they’re very happy today that I did it.”
The process was fairly straightforward, Levy said. With the help of a lawyer, she petitioned the Family Court in Jerusalem for permission to use the sperm. Since she and Netanel were not married, she also had to be recognized as his common-law partner.
“We were together for a year and a half and were living together,” she told the Report. “I’m a widow, for all intents and purposes, and I feel like one.”
The court approved all Levy’s requests within two months, and then she began IVF treatment to conceive, using the nine samples of sperm that had been retrieved from Netanel’s body in the hours after his death.
Fortunately, Levy said, she became pregnant on the first try.
Throughout the nine months of her pregnancy, the first-time mother and grieving widow said she remained steadfast in her decision to bring her late fiancé’s child into the world, even in the face of some disparaging comments.
“Some people said that maybe I would never find a second relationship because I loved someone so much that I chose to have his child even after he died,” she said.
But Levy, who describes herself as “a very scientific person,” said she knew the negative comments were not based on any factual evidence or research because she is among the first women to undertake this process.
In any case, she added, she could not even think about being with another man.
“It was all still very new, and I still felt like I was in a relationship with Netanel, even if he wasn’t alive,” Levy said. “I’m not saying that everyone should do this, but for me it was the right thing to do… I was nearly 35, I didn’t know when I would be able to even look at someone else, and being a mother is very important to me.”
Levy says that six more of her embryos and Netanel’s sperm remain stored in the hospital’s IVF clinic, and she is certain she will have more of her deceased partner’s children in the future.
“This is my time to have children; afterwards, it’s going to be much more difficult, so this was a very easy choice for me,” she said. “Also, and this might be the most important thing, I want to have the children of the man I loved.”
Public awareness
While Levy is now able to cradle a baby that shares the DNA of the man she loved, other widows and relatives of soldiers killed in the recent conflict have not been so fortunate. The issue garnered headlines early in the war when singer and actress Shay-Li Atari requested to extract the sperm of her husband, Yahav Viner, who was murdered in their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7.
Her attempts were unsuccessful because the process to identify his body took too long, but the high-profile case prompted more bereaved families to request the procedure.
Dr. Eran Altman, director of the Sperm Bank at Clalit Beilinson Hospital, near Tel Aviv, told the Report that in comparison to other wars in Israel, where requests for PSR were “anecdotal,” following October 7 “there was a very large surge that involved both soldiers and civilians.”
“I personally started receiving calls (about it) on my private phone from friends of friends, from doctors who knew people,” he said, describing how it was “really a kind of chaos.”
People were calling and asking, “What do we do? Quickly, quickly. How do we preserve sperm of the victims of October 7, including civilians?” Altman said.
“This was really something we hadn’t encountered before, and there were no clear procedures on how to do it,” he continued, adding that “the major difficulty in the first week was the very hard process of identifying those who had been killed in the attack – identification was delayed, and bodies were left in the sun, so in many cases it was already too late [to extract their sperm].”
Altman, who also estimates that some 250 procedures of postmortem sperm retrieval have taken place since those early days, said that in order for the process to be effective, it must happen quickly. In light of that, he and other medical professionals worked with the Health Ministry to ease the process and better define the existing guidelines.
“For example,” he said, “the literature suggests it [the retrieval] must take place within 24 hours; but in the early days, we also tried beyond that… However, we soon saw that it didn’t work, especially in cases where the bodies were not properly refrigerated.”
The changes within the IDF also contributed to the increase in requests, Altman said, pointing to the form the army now presents to a family when they are notified that their son has fallen in the line of duty.
“This was really a revolution that hadn’t existed before,” he said, adding, however, that “many parents or partners are confused at that point and worry that if they don’t sign immediately, they may lose the opportunity.
“From my impression – and also based on conversations afterward – many signed the form just in case,” Altman said.
Today, the question is not only whether to offer the option to bereaved parents and partners but also whether IDF recruits should be required to create a “biological will” stating if they agree to have their sperm be retrieved after death or at least express how they feel about such a procedure. Legislation to make filling out such a form standard practice upon entering the army is being considered by the Knesset.
A study carried out in 2024 by Prof. Bella Savitsky, an epidemiologist and public health specialist at Ashkelon Academic College, asked a sample of 600 Jewish men aged 18–49 how they felt about having their parents or partners use their sperm to continue their legacy in the event of their death.
The study revealed that about half of the men in relationships opposed PSR by their parents, and about 30% opposed it by their partner. Most of the objections centered on a perceived “unethical nature of planned orphanhood,” as well as some religious beliefs.
The study also noted that people opposed the collection of prior consent before army enlistment based on the belief that “18-year-old conscripts are just children who don’t understand anything.”
“There are limitations, of course,” Altman acknowledged. “But if they’re old enough to go to war, they’re old enough to make this decision, and it’s better than having no guidance at all.”
Biblical basis
Last month, an Israeli judge ruled that the family of Yotam Haim, a young man taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and mistakenly killed in Gaza by IDF fire in late 2023, won the right to use his sperm retrieved posthumously.
The judge based his decision not only on previous cases, including that of Levy, but also cited traditional Jewish sources, including from the Book of Genesis, to argue in favor of using Yotam’s sperm to create new life.
Iris Haim, Yotam’s mother, called the ruling “very moving.”
She told the Report: “I feel like we’ve come a long way, that we’ve made a very significant journey: from the day they told us about him – and my world went dark and I felt like my life was over – to the moment they are now allowing me, physically, to continue his DNA.
“It’s a feeling of fulfillment, excitement even, and, I would say, pride in the country for giving this ruling, which is not at all obvious, especially not in a country like this, where everything is so complex,” she said. “There was something very positive in the whole process,” she added.
“We weren’t fighting, we weren’t in a battle or a struggle. We came to it from a very positive place, and that’s how it was the whole way through.”
Haim said that now that the family has the option to have Yotam’s children, it does not mean “I’ll have a grandchild tomorrow.”
“We do want grandchildren, and we want a grandchild from him because he really wanted children. But right now, that’s not where this stands, and he has other roles in this world,” she said.
Living legacy
Alongside the growing public awareness brought about by such cases and procedural changes in the army, Altman highlights medical advances and, more importantly, a cultural shift in the acceptance of alternative family structures as contributing to the phenomenon.
“As someone who manages a sperm bank, I work with single women and lesbian couples seeking pregnancy, and I think today there is much greater openness to different types of families,” he said.
He said it offers bereaved families great comfort.
“From the families I’ve encountered, I’ve seen an enormous need. They describe it as fulfilling the deceased’s wishes. They say the person wanted children, and this prevents them from ‘disappearing’ from the world…” Altman said, adding, “I also feel this is a way to preserve their memory and cope with grief.”
As Levy cradles her now 10-month-old child, this is exactly what she describes.
“People say, ‘How can you bring a child into this world who doesn’t have a father and he’s going to be an orphan…?’ But everyone has their own story, and I don’t think it’s going to be something special or odd for him because this will be the only thing he knows,” she said.
“This is obviously not what I wanted for myself, this is not exactly my dream or what I was waiting for all these years, but this is what I have,” Levy continued, adding that after Netanel’s tragic death, “I could have stayed in bed crying and felt sorry for myself or I could go and do this [have his baby].
“I think I chose the best option,” she said, describing how the baby’s birth last June marked a turning point in her more than a year of grieving.
“I was in mourning right up until the birth, and then, after he was born, it was a whole new world,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not sad. It’s not that I don’t miss Netanel, but I have this now.”
And, Levy stressed, it’s a way to preserve Netanel’s memory.
“There are so many fallen soldiers and people only remember a few names, so it was important to me that Netanel be one of those soldiers who people remember,” she said. “And this is how he’s going to be remembered – as the one whose widow had his child after he died.”■