We knocked on the door of a random apartment in Modiin. My son Elliot was with me. He was ten. We were holding a candy platter with a note from people in Boca Raton who wanted to show a soldier’s family they were thinking of them.
The first thing we heard through the window was a little boy’s voice: Is Abba home?
Your heart drops. Even though you’re there to do something good, even though you’re holding candy and a kind note, that voice cuts through everything. A kid hearing a knock on the door and hoping his father walked through it.
The mom looked out. Told her son it was just a neighbor checking on them. We handed her the platter. The boy saw the candy, grabbed it, and ran. Before she could say anything, he was at the table tearing it open. It didn’t make it to Shabbos.
For thirty seconds, that kid forgot about everything else. Just candy. Just excitement. Just being a kid.
We delivered the rest of the platters that day. Eighty families in Modiin whose husbands had been gone for three weeks by that point. The list came from someone in the community. The money came from friends in Florida. The logistics were me and my ten-year-old walking door to door.
That was the beginning of Smiles for the Kids. No business plan. No organizational structure. Just a need that was obvious to anyone paying attention.
Wives were managing everything alone. Kids were asking when Abba was coming home and nobody had answers. Babies who could barely walk when their fathers left were speaking full sentences by the time they returned. Months of milestones missed. First words, first steps, school performances, bedtime routines that fell apart and got rebuilt around absence.
I heard the same thing from family after family: I just wish he could come home one weekend a month. Not forever. Just long enough to help with the kids. Just long enough for the children to remember his face from something other than a phone screen.
When the soldiers eventually came home, we learned that the separation was only the first challenge. Husbands and wives were in different places mentally. He left on October 8th. She’s been living in whatever today is. He experienced things he can’t explain to someone who wasn’t there. She managed things he doesn’t fully understand because he wasn’t here.
So we started doing things that sound simple but matter more than people think. Dinner certificates with a babysitter sent to the house, so a couple could sit across from each other for two hours without a child between them. Family activities designed to give fathers and kids shared time that creates new memories instead of dwelling on the gap.
When a father serves in the IDF, his entire family serves alongside him. The kids serve. The wife serves. They just don’t get the uniform, the unit, or the structure that comes with it. They serve in isolation, and they do it without the camaraderie that makes military life bearable.
The war everyone sees is the one on the news. The war inside these families plays out quietly, in the space between a knock on the door and a boy’s voice asking if his father came home. Read about the people we’ve met along the way.