“There were so many small miracles involved in Natan’s death, especially with the timing,” Sam says. “That knock on the door came during the day. I’ve heard of so many people who are woken up to that in the middle of the night and then have to call all their sleeping family. I had to call my parents who live in London, but at least it was morning for them.

“The war with Iran had just ended, so my parents and a lot of friends from England were able to fly in for the funeral,” Sam continues. “We were able to sit shivah normally, without restrictions or having to run to the bomb shelter.”

“And the rabbis at the Shura military base kept saying to us, ‘He’s whole, he’s whole. We didn’t understand the implications of what they were saying until later, when we realized that many soldiers are killed by explosions. The RPG that hit Natan hit him in his bulletproof vest, and so he absorbed the entire shock of it internally. He was slightly bruised, but otherwise in perfect condition. His deputy company commander was standing next to him, and he wrote a letter to Natan, which he brought to the shivah.”

Sam holds out an English translation of the letter. There’s a line that reads, “You were lying on the floor so peacefully, as if you’d just gone to sleep. There wasn’t a drop of blood on your body.”

“That he was whole was such a miracle,” she continues. “But even more than that, by his body absorbing the full force of the RPG, the people around him were only lightly injured. Had it exploded differently, not only would the soldiers next to him have been badly injured or worse, the explosives they were in the middle of rigging the building with might have been set off prematurely, causing a mass-casualty incident.”

Sam pulls out her phone to show me a photo of Natan’s khaki-green military vest. Other than a deep dent in the middle of the chest, there’s no damage.

“In his death, he saved many lives,” says Avi. “That was very typical of him, he was that kind of kid. He had a very sweet, cool smile and an attitude that said, ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’ ”

“That smile could pull anyone out of a low mood,” Sam says. “At the shivah, Natan’s platoon commander told us that once he was sitting in his room on base, feeling depressed over everything that was going on with this war, when Natan walked past.”

“Most soldiers wouldn’t dare to approach their commander when he was in a mood,” Avi interjects.

“Right,” says Sam. “But Natan went straight in and said, ‘Achi, you look like you’re not in a good place right now,’ and sat down with him for a heart-to-heart.

“He did that with this friends, too,” Avi says.

“And he had lots of friends, from many different places,” Sam notes. “We made aliyah when he was seven, but went back to England every year for summer camp, so he had his English friends, his neighborhood friends, school friends, friends from the premilitary program he went on, and of course, his friends from the army.

“His friends miss him a lot,” Sam continues. “Not long after he was killed, we went to the cemetery, and there were a bunch of his army friends there, sitting by his kever, chilling. We’re English, and we were so shocked we couldn’t imagine young people hanging out in Bushey Cemetery back in London. But these kids here have lost so many friends, going to the cemetery to visit them is part of their life now.”

“They also come over to our house,” says Avi with a laugh. “Sit on the couch and have a beer with me.”

There’s a sudden silence and the atmosphere of the room becomes heavy with longing and sadness. Avi’s face falls. “We miss him so much,” he whispers.

“Natan and I, we fought a lot,” declares Atalya. “But he was my older brother, and he was so protective of me. We were so close and had so much fun together.”

“We were a very active household,” Sam says with a fond smile. “We have another son, Zevi. He’s seventeen. Between him and Natan, we went to Terem a lot of times with broken bones. Once, we even had both of them, one with a broken leg and one with a broken arm at the same time.” She flicks to a picture on her phone of two laughing boys sprawled on the bright-blue plastic chairs of the Terem waiting room, one with a plaster cast on his arm, the other with one on his leg.

Sam continues to flick through her phone. “His friends made a WhatsApp group of memories of him,” she says. “For his friends to share pictures, videos, and stories of him. Natan was such a good boy, the kind of person who made every friend feel like they were his best friend.”

“He made everyone feel included,” says Avi. “Some of his friends were unusual or a little awkward, but he didn’t judge by externalities. He was such a nonjudgmental, inclusive person.

“And it’s that feeling of inclusivity that characterized his shivah. There was such a powerful feeling of achdus there. The energy of that was palpable. There was a man, Kalman Liebskind from Reshet Bet radio station who said he came to be mechazek us, but he left flying from the atmosphere.”

“First of all, we were originally planning on sitting shivah in our house, but when so many people started streaming in, we moved down the road to a parking lot that had served as a shul during Covid,” says Sam. “And we sat there, and people just kept on coming, from morning to night, streams of people. I had to appoint some of our friends to be ‘shivah bouncers,’ to ask people to leave during the siesta hours so we could rest. So many of them approached us, saying, ‘You don’t know me, but I felt I had to come….’ There was an eighty-year-old woman who goes to the shivah of every fallen soldier and presents the family with a scrapbook of all the articles from newspapers and the Internet she can find.”

“The former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi David Lau, came,” says Avi. “President Herzog; Rabbi Shmuel Slotki, who lost two sons on the seventh of October; someone called Noam Lanier, who funds memorial videos of fallen soldiers for their bereaved family. The father of a hostage came, though in all the chaos I can’t remember who it was.

“And on Shabbos of the shivah, the two English-speaking shuls we are part of joined together and hosted a joint seudah shlishit in our shivah tent. It felt like all the English speakers in Ra’anana were there. We felt like one huge family.

“The shul rabbis, Rabbi Eitan Bendavid and Rabbi Elyada Goldwicht spoke, and we were all just blown away by the atmosphere of achdus during the event,” says Avi.

This wasn’t the first time the Rosenfelds were directly impacted by the dark fingers of the Israel-Hamas war. On October 7, the young man Eliora was dating, Hallel Saadon Hy”d, was killed while heroically battling Hamas terrorists at the Sufa Outpost near the Gazan border.

Now the Rosenfelds have yet another bond in common with the Saadons. They have also looked to their family and the work they’ve done to perpetuate Hallel’s memory.

“We were inspired by Hallel’s family and what they’re doing in his memory,” says Sam. “In the year between finishing high school and enlisting in the army, Hallel worked on a farm for disadvantaged youth near Beit She’an, where he taught horseback riding. The place is very neglected, and his family is raising money to renovate in his memory.”

“Our goal now is to create a nonprofit, to bring more positivity in the world,” Avi says. “We’re still at the brainstorming stages, but the things we’re considering are doing something for youth-at-risk or for soldiers with post-trauma.”

“Every Wednesday since October 7,” says Atalya, “my father would drive me down from Ra’anana to the gas station at Mavki’im on the Gaza border. That’s where the soldiers usually stop on their way out from Gaza. It’s a one-and-a-half-hour drive. For a few hours, I make trays and trays of schnitzels in pitas for the soldiers who’ve just come out. That’s in the summer. In the winter, we cooked soup. The soldiers were always so happy to see us. We were giving them a taste of home.”

“We saw them when they first came out, and some of them looked really terrible,” adds Avi. “They’d just seen who-knows-what in Gaza.”

Again, Sam scrolls through the pictures on her phone, this time stopping at a picture of her, Avi, and a handsome blond young man with the sweetest smile — Natan, who manages to look strikingly like both his mother and his father — in the desert. “Natan went to a mechinah in Yerucham, near Mitzpeh Yericho,” she explains. “It’s literally a hole in the middle of nowhere. This is taken near a lookout point where the boys from the mechinah like to hang out. It’s in the middle of the desert. We’re looking into building a pergola there in Natan’s memory so the boys have shade, some protection from the sun and heat when they hang out there. We’ve already raised money and are getting quotes from builders.”

“I’ve also started speaking about achdus,” says Avi. “I spoke in our shul last week, and we’re set to travel to South Africa tomorrow morning to speak there. That feeling of achdus that we felt during the shivah — that’s what Klal Yisrael needs now,” he continues passionately.

“Israeli society is so polarized and politicized, and each group needs to learn to think and talk positively about each other. The news makes it sound so negative, sows so much discord. But I really believe people are essentially good. Yes, there are bad apples, yes, it’s true that four-fifths of Bnei Yisrael didn’t make it out of Mitzrayim. But I believe the majority of the Jewish people want to be part of our nation and realize that we’re in a historically significant time, that we’re at the end of the galus, and big things are happening now and are going to happen, and they want to be part of it.”

Avi pauses. “When Natan died, we made a decision that we were going to be positive. We weren’t going to fall into darkness and depression. It wasn’t easy for me to do that. I’m the child of Holocaust survivors, my grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz and my parents were scarred from their experiences in the camps. But I know that Hashem will bless those who bless His people and curse those who curse His people. He’s above us, everything that’s happening has a purpose, a much bigger purpose than we know about. As I said at Natan’s levayah, ‘Hashem, it’s enough! The people of Israel are good people. Hashem, save us, because it’s only up to You.’ ”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 961)