https://archive.is/x8yFD#selection-1365.0-1373.34

The same report estimated that about 5 percent of the self-employed reservists have lost their businesses. Regular employees increasingly get the message from the workplace that employers are losing patience with their long-term absence.

Family and finances, therefore, can’t really be separated. And neither of them can be separated from the vast problem of mental health. Dr. Shiri Daniels is the national director of counselling for Eran, a nongovernmental organization that offers anonymous immediate mental health assistance, for soldiers and others. She says the group has received at least 40,000 requests for help from soldiers – not including those who contacted the group after completing their service. This is at least a 100 percent rise from previous years.

Other nonprofits like Natal, the Israel Trauma and Resiliency Center, have seen a similar or more dramatic rise. Daniels reports mostly terror and trauma among soldiers in earlier phases of the war, while now people contact them more with depression and severe emotional distress – including family difficulties. One reservist told a hotline volunteer that sometimes he wished he had been killed in Gaza, because he lost his business, his wife wants to divorce him and he feels lost.

Israelis are also jittery about the worst possible effects. Last July, Natal reported a 145 percent rise in people contacting the organization with suicidal tendencies. And in recent weeks, the IDF reported that 21 soldiers committed suicide in 2024 – the highest number in a decade.

Some reservists are ground down by the injustice of sacrificing while the vast majority of draft-eligible ultra-Orthodox men hardly get drafted at all. Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled last year that the state must start drafting the Haredim, after decades of delay. But out of roughly 80,000 who are eligible, only a paltry few hundred were actually drafted. The government, meanwhile, is frantically hammering out a law to make the mass exemption permanent for as many Haredim as possible.

“On October 7,” said the three-tour reservist, “everyone understood you were doing it [to defend] your home. And now there’s a sense of: What are you doing it for? You’re a frier [sucker] and they aren’t drafting Haredim.”

Surveys strongly concur: Last September, in a poll by the Institute for National Security Studies 58 percent of Jewish respondents said the legislation that would give a permanent exemption to many Haredim would damage their motivation for joining combat service. By November, that portion rose 10 points, to two-thirds.