TIMES OF ISRAEL
by Ben Sales
August 26, 2014

‘They become your second family,’ says Ron Gordon, who joined the IDF in 2012. ‘You don’t have anyone else here. You live with your friends’

JTA – When Shir Kleyman, an infantry instructor for the Israel Defense Forces and a Los Angeles native, found out that someone named Sean had died fighting in Gaza, she knew the army had lost a fellow lone soldier. The official announcement came soon afterward as Kleyman, 19, was sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe on furlough: The fallen soldier was her friend, Texas native Sean Carmeli.

“I asked Sean’s last name and said ‘please don’t be Carmeli, please don’t be Carmeli,’ ” Kleyman said. “You find this out and don’t know what to do with yourself. I didn’t know how to handle it. You feel it because you know that you’re one of them.” Kleyman, who joined the IDF in January, knew both Carmeli and fellow Californian Max Steinberg, who died alongside each other in Gaza on July 20. Though Steinberg and Kleyman grew up in the same Los Angeles neighborhood, they met only when serving kitchen duty together in the army. At Steinberg’s funeral, Kleyman stood in the honor guard across from Steinberg’s parents. She called the funeral “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life.”

About 2,800 soldiers are serving in the Israeli military despite not growing up in the country, according to the Lone Soldiers Program, which provides them with social and other services. Three have died in the current conflict with Hamas: Along with Carmeli and Steinberg, French immigrant Jordan Bensemhoun was killed on July 20. Most native Israelis, for whom army service is both a national obligation and a rite of passage, have networks of family and friends who served before them to help handle the deaths of comrades in war. But military volunteers whose families remain abroad say their strongest support is each other…..

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http://www.timesofisrael.com/during-combat-and-after-lone-soldiers-look-to-each-other-for-support/