“Being in ‘doing mode’ is part of the healing process. Otherwise, you just sink into anxiety and worry,” Chen Arbel, co-founder of the Israel Defense Forces Reservists’ Wives Forum, told JNS in a recent interview. “Founding the forum, the community around it and promoting our cause is very meaningful. It will affect our kids,” she said.
“I think the community is the strongest part of it: Being together, sharing the same goals, hardships and late-night hours,” she added.
Arbel and Shani Nattiv co-founded the forum in November 2023, as Israel called up some 300,000 reserve soldiers to defend the country in a multi-front war. The forum, which began as a spontaneous Facebook initiative after the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, now includes over 15,000 active members and represents some 100,000 families in Israel.
Led by a dozen mothers, the forum spearheaded the Mobilized for Reserves program, a government aid package, and legislation protecting reservist wives’ employment rights. In April 2024, it was officially recognized as a non-profit organization and continues to lobby the government, IDF, local authorities and media to expand support for reserve families.
Within a year, the forum won the Rappaport Prize for Women Generating Change and was chosen to light a torch at Israel’s 76th Independence Day ceremony.
Arbel lives in Ra’anana in central Israel with her husband, Itay, and their two daughters: Emmy, 5, and Gali, 2. During the war, Itay served for 150 days, mostly inside Gaza. Before the war, Arbel held a core position in a small startup. She had to give it up over six months ago.
“Being at home with the kids, worrying about Itay and handling my career was a lot,” she said. “The levels of pressure and anxiety were very high. I decided to stay at home and support the kids. It was my choice. Every family makes their own, but having to choose is the hardest part.”
Arbel spoke of the hardships of having her husband called up to serve the country for an extended period.
“It’s like two different and separate realities when he is away,” she said. “I go into automatic mode. I do what I have to do and count each and every day until it ends. For me, thinking about such a reality again is unbearable; it’s very hard to sustain.”
She added: “When he comes back, it takes a few weeks to readjust the communication and the day-to-day life at home. Everyone around us asks how we are doing. By the time we get back to a normal and stable routine, some get called up again.”
Forum co-founder Shani Nattiv, whose husband Neil served 270 days of reserve duty, told JNS about the heavy burden that falls upon reservists’ wives and reservists themselves as they answer the call of duty.
“I couldn’t keep my job. I had to run to shelters with my kids,” she recalled. “The silence from society was deafening. There was no system in place to support families like mine. I was looking for a place to share with other spouses, and I realized we needed more than just the support of small groups, we needed structural recognition and solutions.”
She added: “My husband still hasn’t gone to the next round yet, but it still brings us back to Oct. 7, to the unknown. He is still her,e but the kids are smart enough to know that after the next alarm, he might have to go back to the war zone.”
According to Nattiv, most of the children of reservists are “in regression.” She said: “It’s like having a missing parent. It’s a huge trauma, and we don’t have enough emotional support.”
Like Arbel, Nattiv stressed the importance of having a community as part of the IDF Reservists’ Wives Forum.
“Our challenges aren’t just personal, they are systematic. We expanded our efforts to advocate for official recognition of reservist families as a population with unique needs. We heard about women who got fired. Workplace protection is a very important element for both the wives and the reservists themselves,” she said.
Nattiv said that when the IDF established a welfare fund for reservists’ wives, at the forum’s request, its leaders informed the military what they needed.
“We engage with the government, we present data all the time and we advocate for more structured emotional support and financial safeguards because it’s not enough. The war is still going on,” she said. “We don’t need a patchwork solution that has only a temporary impact. We need to secure our families.”
Last year, the Israeli Cabinet approved a 9 billion shekel ($2.5 billion) wartime assistance program for reservists, which Nattiv called a major step in fighting for financial assistance to reservists and their families.
Speaking of the rare cases in which reservists refuse to return to the front lines, Nattiv said it’s not fair to judge the soldiers who go back again and again as families fall apart.
“We need more people out there so that our husbands can be at home and not fighting for a year and a half. It’s about national resilience,” she said. “Reservists were only three percent of society earlier in the war, and they’re down to two percent. You can’t rely on these two percent to go back again and again, because families are broken and they can’t fight anymore. We need more fighters over there.”
