By mid-morning on Oct. 7, 2023, even though she still didn’t know, Adar Cohen was a widow. Her husband, Yorai, a fighter in Yamam, Israel’s elite counter-terrorism unit, was already dead.
He was 29. They had been together for 13 years, married for three. Their daughter, Niv, was one year and three months old.
It was never the Yamam way to wait for orders. As soon as their unit managed to coordinate details, they were already on their way south, on the day Hamas terrorists crossed over from Gaza and went on to murder more than 1,200 soldiers and civilians.
But something else about that morning makes Yorai Cohen’s death—and that of his fellow fighters—so hard to absorb even now, two and a half years later. Until then, in Yamam’s entire 40-year history, the unit had lost 16 fighters. Sixteen, across four decades of some of the most dangerous counter-terrorism work in the world.
“I never had a fear that he’d die,” Adar told JNS.org in an interview for Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. “Especially because he was in Yamam. Traditionally, they had a low number of injuries or fatalities. The statistics were on our side.”
By 8:30 that morning, within half an hour of making contact with terrorists at Sha’ar HaNegev Junction, Yamam fighters were ambushed and killed. In a single morning, the unit lost nine fighters. Yorai was among them. They fell in battle, holding the line—keeping the terrorists at bay, preventing their entry into other communities, stopping what could have been an even greater massacre.
Adar, now 31 and living in Herzliya, says she married Yorai, her high school sweetheart, knowing exactly what he did. It never crossed her mind to ask him to stop.
“His job was immensely satisfying,” she said. “He prevented a lot of innocent deaths. And I know he’d say: if I need to die, let it be this way, doing the thing that is most important to me. He wasn’t scared of death.”
She paused. “I think he’d be annoyed by the timing—that it was too soon. But who could have imagined Oct. 7?”
Before Oct. 7, Adar was a customer success manager at a tech company, a full-time student, a mother to a newborn, and the wife of a man who spent two or three nights a week away on missions. She managed it all. After Yorai’s death, she tried to return to work.
“I thought that after the Oct. 7 tragedies, nothing worse could happen,” she said. “But then they did.”
Six months after Yorai was killed, a close friend of his from the Yamam unit—one of her pillars of support since his death—was also killed in action. Adar left her job that day and never went back.
“My brain wasn’t functioning,” she said. “Today, my energy is directed to other things entirely.”
Adar today is not the same person she was before the tragedy.
What has shifted most, she said, is her sense of proportion. “You understand that it’s so stupid to sweat about the little things—like ‘Why didn’t you throw your socks in the laundry basket?’ My proportions have changed. My patience toward my daughter has grown, and toward others around me, less. I don’t have much patience for political correctness. I am far more vocal about what I need and don’t need.”
‘The body remembers’
Niv is now three and a half. She is, by her mother’s account, theatrical, verbal, physically strong—she can hoist a six-pack of bottled water with ease—and stubborn in a way that is unmistakably her father’s.
She was too young to remember him; she was barely a toddler when he died. But somehow, she knew. After he was killed, she would wander from room to room looking for him, calling his name. Every day at 5 p.m., she would go to the front door.
“The body remembers,” Adar said.
The night before her third Yom Hazikaron without him, Niv cried as Adar put her to bed, saying she missed her Aba. Adar explained that the sirens she would hear the next day were to remember him. Niv looked at her mother—so perceptive in that unnerving way young children can be—and said: “Don’t be sad, Imma. He’s always with us in our hearts.”
It is Adar’s responsibility, as she sees it, to build the picture of Yorai that Niv cannot construct from memory. She wants her daughter to know not only the brave fighter that everyone eulogizes, but also Yorai the best friend, the son, the husband, the father, the CrossFit champion, the one everyone called Yoyo.
“What he liked and didn’t like. What he did to annoy me. The trips we took together. What kind of father he was.”
She tells stories. She makes videos. She opened a webpage in his memory. “I consider it an investment for Niv,” she said, “so that one day she can look back and see how her mom—when she was young and pretty—spoke about Aba (father).”
When she sees Yorai’s qualities surfacing in Niv—the stubbornness, the physical strength—it does not bring comfort exactly.
“It’s more a sense of missed opportunity,” she said. “I can only imagine his sense of pride in the qualities she took from both of us.”
Ahead of Yom Hazikaron, Adar’s response to her daughter—who asked why she is the only one in her kindergarten without a father—is careful and deliberate:
“That’s true. You’re so special. You’re the only one who can speak about your Aba on Yom Hazikaron.”
Drawing strength from IDFWO
It is in navigating this—the dailiness of grief, and the particular loneliness of raising a child searching for a father she cannot quite remember—that the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization has become part of Adar’s life.
She admits she didn’t want their support at first. When they came to the shiva, her first instinct was resistance.
“I kept asking myself, ‘What is their connection to me?’” she told JNS.
Two months later, a close friend convinced her to attend a gathering for widows and young children.
“For the first time, I got a glimpse of what life would look like for Niv,” she said.
The organization runs empowerment camps several times a year. Adar describes the production as extraordinary, the children genuinely happy.
“They develop a healthy attitude toward their loss,” she said. “They even develop dark humor.”
What matters most to her is the framework it gives Niv—a cohort of children in the same situation, a sense that she is not entirely alone in her loss.
Recently, a trip abroad organized through IDFWO for widows and their children was canceled because of the ongoing war. Niv had been counting down to it. She was excited, Adar said, to go to “a country with no sirens, full of children who don’t have dads.”
The organization also flew Adar to Prague to speak at a fundraising event.
“It was very meaningful for me,” she said, “because I managed to move people to tears simply by speaking about Yorai and our little family.”
Yom Hazikaron is complicated for Adar. She attends the ceremony for Yorai’s unit and finds some comfort in being close to people who knew him in ways she didn’t, who can tell her things from the field that he never shared with her.
The next day, the cemetery. Then home.
In Nahariya, where Yorai grew up, a garden was built in his memory.
She is clear-eyed about what the day is—and isn’t—for her.
“Yom Hazikaron is not for him,” she said. “My personal ‘zikaron’ (memory) is every day in those endless moments that remind me of him. I don’t need a specific day to remember him or thank him.”
She describes changing the bed sheets recently, suddenly remembering how Yorai used to wake up with them crumpled and twisted around him—and how she used to complain every morning as she pulled them back into place.
“I’d forgotten that about him,” she said. “For so long, I’ve just been making the bed according to the way I sleep. Not how we sleep.”
She still says “we.”
Adar Cohen is supported by the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization, a nonprofit that provides programs including empowerment retreats, holiday activities, group frameworks for mothers and young children, scholarships, and health grants. Since its founding, the organization has supported thousands of bereaved families whose loved ones were killed while serving and defending the State of Israel and its people.
