Smile at the world, and it will smile back
I arrived at my interview with the Guedalia women not knowing exactly what to expect. They were all here to raise awareness about their fallen family fellow, Sgt.-Maj. Yosef Malachi Guedalia – their son, son-in-law, brother, brother-in-law, and husband.
On October 7, he rose to the unimaginable challenge of the Hamas terrorist invasion, paying the ultimate price in order to rescue and protect the nation of Israel that he was so dearly dedicated to and loved.
This was not the week-long shiva following the funeral, however; this was almost five months later, and the mood in the room was pleasant, even cheerful, if somewhat hesitant. It belied the upturned, open book on the living room table, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, by Joanne Cacciatore, PhD, which someone was reading.
But as I would soon hear, this strong and close family had, more than less, learned to genuinely smile and bear it.
More than 1,200 soldiers and civilians were murdered during the Oct. 7 massacre, leaving behind thousands of bereaved relatives. Yosef, 22, was among those killed, lost to his beloved Senai (pronounced See-NAI), now a widow.
Senai and Yosef met at Camp Moshava in Pennsylvania. She had been a camper there for several years, and Yosef had been going from Israel to be a madrich (counselor). Senai made aliyah in 2018 when she was 18, and the following summer, they were both back as camp counselors.
On Friday, October 6, Yosef had come home from army duty to celebrate Simchat Torah, his favorite holiday, with his family that night and the next day. But his commander called him and said, “Be ready to return to base at 1 p.m. tomorrow,” unaware what lay in store for his soldiers and all of Israel on that Black Shabbat day.
“That night, he was dancing in the street, going from place to place, celebrating with his people, the Torah, and his family – that was the peak for Yosef,” Senai said in a recently released video interview from Shifra Soloveichik’s “Women of Valor – Women of the War” story-sharing digital initiative – which was inspired by their story.
Don’t wait for things to come – go get them
At 8 a.m. Saturday, Yosef got the call to “get ready.” Ten minutes later, a siren went off. He reassured me, saying ‘it’s OK, it’s OK.’ Then he called his friend Guy, who was also in the Duvdevan special forces unit, to find out what was happening. When Guy told him he was going, Yosef decided on his own to go with him.
“He hugged me, said ‘I love you – see you soon” and that he had to go, she said. “It was normal for him to leave, but he was rushing, so I knew that something was up,” Senai recounted.
Yosef and Guy headed back to Yehuda and Samaria in the North. He had said that he would be back after Shabbat, but she found out from other women whose husbands called them at around 2 p.m. that they had gone to the South.
Senai continues the narrative with her mother-in-law, Dina. Four Duvdevan special-force four-man teams went into Kibbutz Kfar Aza that day, one of the Gaza border communities hardest hit in the sudden Hamas assault. His team included Guy, Roi, and Or “Orush” Yosef Ran, zt”l, who was also killed in action.
They arrived at 11 a.m., and proceeded to go house-to-house for two hours, eliminating terrorists and rescuing civilians.
A bodycam video shows Yosef rescuing a wounded man at 1:12 p.m. After that, they took him out to a helicopter to be sent to hospital for treatment. The Guedalias have been in contact with the wounded man; Yosef’s father David met him the day he was released from the hospital. “If Yosef and his team had come two minutes later, I wouldn’t be here now,” he said.
The team went back inside, this time to a place near the gate, and continued their mission.
“There’s a terrorist playing dead under the vehicle!” Guy yelled in the vehicle. Yosef, who was also there, opened the door, pointed his gun down, and shot the terrorist dead.
Then they saw an RPG aimed at them, but it was fired before they could get to it. They managed to get out of the vehicle, but then two grenades were thrown at them.
Yosef yelled “Grenade!” jumped toward the gate, and was shot.
“He was rescuing people – that side of him we didn’t know so well,” Senai said.
“He was a warrior, telling other people what to do – in a voice I had never heard before. It was shocking, but amazing – that’s what he was doing in the last hour of his life.” (He was killed about an hour after that video was taken.) “But he had been doing things like that for a year already – the definition of a hero.”
Although he was among the first killed on that fateful Saturday, the family wasn’t informed until Monday. Yosef’s oldest brother Asher, also in a special combat unit, had been fighting nearby at Re’im, where many young people were killed while celebrating life at the Supernova festival with music and dance. He also thought that Yosef had been sent to the North but heard rumors otherwise and then figured out the worst. Asher asked his commanders to tell him when the officers were going to break the news to his family so he could go with them – and he wanted them to find out as soon as possible.
DINA RECALLED that she was out for a walk with Senai and Revital, Dina's daughter-in-law when Asher and the officers arrived. They had already told the terrible news to Yosef’s father David.
“It was our anniversary,” Dina said. “David greeted me, then looked out across the street, and they came.
“I can’t say what I felt… shock,” she quietly recalled. “But as a mother, I worried about everyone around me, focusing on Senai, the kids; busy acting, finding people” – such as her middle son Charlie, who was also fighting in the North and had to be brought out from an ambush situation.
“I was looking at Asher, being so thankful that he was with us. That hit me very strongly – they were both there, both fighting. I just kept hugging him, being thankful.”
According to IDF rules, the sibling of a fallen soldier is not allowed to begin or continue serving. But like many others in his situation, Asher implored the authorities to allow him to continue fighting, and his request was granted. He had just been released from service on the day we all met.
“I didn’t sleep; sat up all night, lit candles, I think. All I remember is crying,” Dina recalled. “So many hearts are broken. Senai came down, we spoke quite a while. It was beautiful that we could share. Since then, we share a very close space – where we share Yosef.”
“I remember the exact moment I understood what had happened,” shared Yosef’s younger sister Esther, who wasn’t at our meeting. “I was in my room on the phone and I heard my little sister Elisheva yell ‘this can’t be happening; this can’t be true!’ – in the most tragic and heartbroken voice that I have ever heard – so I ran downstairs and I saw them. I saw my eldest brother, with two people in uniforms that I didn’t know standing behind him, and all of them with this expression on their faces that said it all.”
SENAI’S MOTHER, Norah Mazar, was at a demonstration for Israel at Boston Common that Monday with two of her sons when the Guedalias found out about Yosef’s death. Her husband, Shmuel Weglein, called her and told her to come home with the boys right away.
“It was the worst call one could get - he wouldn’t tell me anything else. I then called Senai and she told me.” Norah didn’t want to share her own reaction to the terrible news with me.
“We all came immediately, on October 9. Shmuel and our boys returned to Brookline,” she said. “I stayed to be with Senai – and have basically been here since.” Shmuel has been back several times, and they have also switched places.
Norah thought she would be the one giving Senai support, but she got so much from her daughter. “She has an incredible balance of resilience, vulnerability and strength,” her mother said. “I’ve known her a long time, but I didn’t know that I would derive such strength from her. It’s profound: I’m in awe of my child.”
“I feel very lucky that my mother has been here from day one,” her daughter said. “It’s a privilege to be here,” Norah responded: “to hear more and more about Yosef. I wouldn’t want to miss any of it.”
If it’s important, there is always time and always a way
Senai said that Yosef didn’t usually share details about what he did in his military service, even though he had been on over a hundred missions. But one time when he came home, he said, “You want to hear something funny that happened?” He related how they had just gone into some place looking for a terrorist. They knew where he lived, so they went in to look for him – and in their search, made somewhat of a mess of the place.
They didn’t find the terrorist, but a woman was sitting there, who turned out to be his mother. “She wasn’t happy about what her son did,” she told Yosef. He could have just continued with his mission, but he stopped for a moment and asked her: “Who is going to help you clean all this up?”
“He was always thinking of others,” Senai said: “And he always did what had to be done in the moment.”
A large aspect of his thinking about others was putting his wife before the army, which she also mentioned at the funeral. “He was good about that, calling me throughout the day,” she said: “He didn’t bring the army home with him.” Once when he was free to go home on leave but not mentally prepared to, one of his friends asked, “why are you still here – why don’t you go home? Yosef responded: “No, no – Senai doesn’t deserve to see me with my head still in the army.”
Living by your ideals and beliefs is really the only way to live
Dina shared an incident she heard about her son. “Once, he was with a group of guys who were talking about something he didn’t want to hear. He quietly and sweetly and unassumingly got up and said, “I have to go: This is not bringing the Beit Hamikdash [the Holy Temple].’ Most of them didn’t know what that was; Later they saw one of his friends looking it up on Google. ‘If this is important for Yosef,’ they said, ‘it must be really important!’”
But he was never trying to preach, she said: “He just wanted to be better.”
Senai then said that one of his commanders told her a few weeks ago that they were talking once about truth, and Yosef told him: “I lied once when I was a kid – and it felt so horrible, I never lied again.”
Then Norah shared another story: There was apparently an exercise in the army where they had to write down harsh criticisms of each other. “Each person had a paper, and they would pass them around, so you could learn from them and improve. Everyone’s paper had a bunch of criticisms on them, but on Yosef’s paper: No one could find a single criticism to write!”
HOW ARE they coping now?
I asked Senai how she’s dealing with this – and what advice she could give to others in the same situation.
“There’s no rule book,” she said. “Look ahead and flow through your day. I try to see the good; you should do what’s good for you. I’ve met a lot of women like me, unfortunately, and each does it their own way.” Her mother concurred: “Whatever way you’re doing it, it’s the right way.”
Norah added that, from a mother’s perspective, the most painful thing in the world is seeing your child suffering. “But it’s the most incredible thing to see them choosing life – so it balances out.”
“In the beginning,’ Dina said, “the pain was so deep: It was something I wouldn’t get out of: crying, never ending sadness. But then I realized I could stop it – by putting a good thought in its place. Know that as low as things get, to the depths of sorrow, the aliyah – the rising up – will match it: the tremendous joy. That’s how it is in this world – focus on that.”
“Coping comes from being in the collective hug of family,” Norah said. “Parents never know what kind of person their child’s partner will be, but we were fortunate – Yosef was so good. Although I would have wanted to share many decades with him, his goodness and inner beauty were apparent in our first hour together.”
Family is the most important thing,” Esther said, “and now more than ever, I see and feel how much strength we have – how much we hold each other together, how much we push each other forward.
Be humble, be quiet, be the best
“Half a day at a time,” Yosef’s younger sister said. “I just try and think what I need to do next and how I can do it in the best way possible.”
“I look up to my sisters – even my little sister Elisheva – they are the strongest people I know,” Esther said. “When their husbands weren’t home because they went to the army to protect us, it’s not even a question: They just continue being the best mom they can be and the best sisters they can be! I don’t know what I would have done without my sisters – and I’m the luckiest that I have them.”
Yaeli, Yosef’s second-oldest sister, said that they are all still sad and emotional but they just “cry in the morning, go to work, live life – this defines our whole family.” She said that their mother “still only thinks about us and our pain, not hers.” But life is not the same. For example, their mother sometimes gives talks to the public several times a week.
Dina said that is something she never realized she could do – until now. “I’m not a speaker, but I couldn’t just sit on the side,” she said.
She was invited to speak along with Iris Chaim at Ulpanat Horev Jerusalem, a girls’ middle and high school.
Iris lost her son Yotam in a tragic rescue attempt that went wrong. He was one of the three hostages who, while escaping Hamas, were accidentally killed by the IDF. She famously wrote a letter to the soldiers involved, saying that she didn’t blame them.
“The moment I told her that Kfar Aza was also where Yosef [from their religious family] ‘rose up’ – we don’t like to say that he ‘fell’ – she responded that ‘there are no barriers; we are all one, no difference,’ Dina said.
“This is just one example of how Yosef’s light came through: how he touched everyone,” his mother said.
Senai is in her second year of a social work degree and has been assigned to do fieldwork in a retirement home. “I love it,” she said.
Like her mother-in-law, she has also discovered an untapped talent for sharing about Yosef in public.
“They organized a program in the Knesset for bereaved families recently, and I shared about my situation with three groups. The organizer told me he had been in Yosef’s class in elementary school.” This showed her how wide the circles were that were touched by her “still present” partner. “Every person is a whole world; even those in the outer circle are amazed by him.”
I was also one of the many touched by him; by his ever-present smile, his kind, supportive and non-judgmental nature.
I knew Yosef and Asher from our weekly ultimate flying disc game. They would often come all the way to Jerusalem from Beit Shemesh; after they each got married, their wives would also come to watch our sometimes co-ed game.
We knew that if the Guedalia brothers were on the same team, they would constantly take turns throwing a long cross-field "huck" pass to each other for the score. They were very competitive, but not argumentative, always playing according to the "Spirit of the Game," the first and most important rule in ultimate. We miss both of them, hoping that Asher will soon come back.
Norah said that because of Yosef and Senai’s love for nature, a nature reserve is being created in his memory thanks to the participation of their community in Brookline.
Dina said that they are paving part of the path they made – part of the Israel National Trail – to go on their nine-hour walk of aliyah laregel (ascending by foot) from Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem during the hagim (Jewish holidays) and calling it Derech Hamalach – Angel’s Way – in honor of Yosef Malachi.
“You are my angel,” Senai had said in her heart-rending eulogy at the funeral.
SHIRA, Yosef’s eldest sister, also wasn’t at our meeting. In fact, she hadn’t participated in many events since October 7 because her husband, Yonatan, was in reserve duty and there was still so much to do now, even though he was released a couple of weeks ago.
“Now that he’s back, I allow myself to be more present in what happened,” she said.
The fact that Yosef was killed in a war where there have been so many casualties makes her ability to cope different.
“I don’t feel as alone; this is what we’re going through as a collective,” she said. “Seeing my mother, sisters, and sisters-in-law being okay and functional also helps me a bit more not to fall apart.”
“Yosef was a very involved, fun uncle,” Shira said. She was instructed to tell her children in very simple terms that Uncle Yosef is not coming back. But her five-year-old son Liam corrected her right away and said that he is – when Mashiach comes and the dead are revived.
ELISHEVA, the youngest of the Guedalia clan, now 13, said that not many people her age need to deal with this terrible feeling of loss.
“I struggle being around people who try to understand my situation, since it’s way too hard for me to understand it myself,” she said. “At first, I didn’t know how to deal with it, but over time I learned to cope with the pain.”
Yosef had this unique way to touch others, his youngest sister said. “He was always caring, nice and funny – it was never boring with him.”
This loss has changed her in different ways. “I’ve become more understanding of others’ struggles. It made me understand the importance of family and friends more, and it gave me the purpose to honor Yosef’s memory by being the best person I can be. I feel the shlichut – the agency of doing all the stuff that I know Yosef would be doing if he were here.
“We hear so many beautiful things about Yosef – his humility, his dedication, his love for Israel and family,” Dina said. “Through Yosef, we see how much good is in the world – what he was and what we can continue to be.”
Shira's husband Yonatan wrote several things that he learned from Yosef, in a memorial photograph book that was on the living room table – next to the book about bearing grief. Some of them have been mentioned above in italics; others are “lead by example,” “don’t be too proud or shy to ask for help” and “attitude is everything.”
“Yosef always told me that ‘the best plan is no plan,’ Elisheva said. “Now more than ever, I can hear him saying that with his smile, which shows and says ‘don’t worry – it will all work out.’”
Now that Yosef Malachi Guedalia of blessed memory is back on high, may his example, attitude, dedication and goodness continue to inspire us and help us learn how to follow this “Angel’s Way.”