A Tragic Epilogue

In JRB’s Winter 2024 issue, I published an essay looking at the great Hebrew memoir of the Yom Kippur War, Adjusting Sights, through the lens of the new war in which we Israelis now find ourselves. The accounts of soldiers scrambling to protect the country and themselves amid the terrible collapse of October 7, 2023, and particularly accounts from the Armored Corps, reminded me of Haim Sabato’s account of his time as a young tank crewman in the desperate fighting against the Syrian offensive of 1973.

I interviewed Sabato, now the head of a yeshiva near Jerusalem, and his English translator, Hillel Halkin. I also interviewed a young tank crewman, the son of friends, who’d read Adjusting Sights in high school and was now in the thick of the fighting in Gaza. Because he didn’t have the army’s permission to speak to a journalist, we agreed that I’d call him “Tomer.” His real name was Yuval Shoham.
 

Yuval was smart and literary, with assurance and historical perspective beyond his years. His father, Efraim Shoham, is a professor of medieval Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University. His mother, Oshrat, is an attorney in the office of the state prosecutor, specializing in the prosecution of sexual abuse. At one point in this war, three of the Shohams’ five sons were fighting simultaneously, Yuval and his two older brothers, each on a different flank of Gaza City.

We spoke in his family’s living room in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Baka, under shelves of books. Yuval talked about his faith in the justice of the war, in his comrades, and particularly in his tank, a Merkava IV: “There were minutes when I was dying to get out, of course,” he said. “But it’s truly a wonder of creation. We have faith in the machine.”

Yuval grew up in the egalitarian Orthodox synagogue Hakhel, which his parents helped found, and whose members included Hersh Goldberg-Polin—an Israeli American, slightly older than Yuval, who was taken hostage at the Nova music festival on October 7 and murdered by Hamas eleven months later. Long after my interview with Yuval, I heard that in different parts of the Gaza combat zone, he would shout Hersh’s name from his tank, hoping that his friend would hear.

On December 29, 2024, Staff Sergeant Yuval Shoham was killed in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia. He was twenty-two. May his memory be a blessing.