“You aren’t starting from scratch. You are building a beautiful house on ruins, which is even more complex. Suddenly you step on nails, suddenly you step on broken glass from the previous house.”
These words, spoken by Yael, lay bare the emotional reality of an unfolding Israeli story. In the spring of 2025, a new family was established under a chuppah, founded on a deep, revitalizing love. Together, Yael and Amit married and brought seven young children into a single household, attempting to anchor two distinct timelines of profound grief into a hopeful shared future.
Their paths to that chuppah were defined by two extreme tragedies. Yael’s first husband fell in combat in November 2023, during the brutal opening weeks of the Swords of Iron War, thrusting her and their three children into sudden bereavement. Amit’s loss was no less profound: when his first wife passed away from terminal cancer, he found himself raising their four young children alone while working around the clock just to keep the family afloat.
Beneath the emotional haze of their new union lay a sharp financial and psychological paradox. In her first marriage, Yael and her late husband were tight-budget university students driving a rundown car she constantly feared would break down on the road. Then, in the wake of tragedy, she had to navigate a complex web of state support, where certain resources are strictly reserved for the distant future. In the here and now, some needs are met by the Ministry, while other everyday needs go unmet.
Yet to the outside world, none of this complexity is visible. The widespread assumption is that remarriage resolves the struggles of bereavement – that a new partner closes the financial and emotional gaps overnight. In reality, the cognitive and administrative burden on someone navigating trauma is enormous, and rarely something they can shoulder alone.
“Grief leaks directly into the checking account, turning basic budgeting into an emotional battleground,” explains Yael. Even more urgent is the need to catch up on many months of no or low income and newly emerged expenses related to the trauma. “Without structure, spending patterns quickly become bound to the trauma of survival. Money cannot organize itself. A defensive mechanism takes over when spending. There is also the instinct to live entirely in the moment because tomorrow feels abstract.” Amit nods in agreement, noting that while the desire to secure the family’s future is there, the psychological toll actively stalls forward momentum. “We knew we wanted to balance our needs and build long-term financial security,” he shares, “but the weight of trauma paralyzes the capacity to initiate complex processes.”
Compounding this interior struggle is the rigid nature of the state’s safety net. While it provides crucial, structured frameworks for the future, the system operates on a sterile, automated track that inadvertently expects people to stay frozen in their grief.
Yael gives voice to the subtle confinement this landscape creates: “In the Ministry of Defense, you feel like you’re in a ‘sea of widows.’ It fixes you in place. Your status is permanently designated as ‘widow,’ leaving you to tread water while well-meaning but misguided voices in the community isolate you further with warnings like, ‘If you remarry you will lose your rights.’”
When Yael and Amit chose to marry, a common public assumption followed them: the flawed belief that the moment a widow stands under the chuppah for a second time, the problem solves itself. The public logic is simple – she is married now, there is a husband to step in, and a partner expected to improve family finances.
But stepping into a second marriage brings its own profound disorientation. Social and bureaucratic labels become blurred, leaving a person caught in an identity crisis. “There is something complex about marrying again,” Yael says. “You don’t know where to put yourself. Are you a widow? Are you not a widow? It is confusing.”
Far from the neat conclusion people expect, remarriage is exactly where the deepest complexities begin. The illusion that a new partner magically absorbs previous trauma is shattered by the day-to-day reality of building a blended household, both financially and emotionally.
A unique and deeply sensitive set of structural imbalances also enters the home in a case like Yael and Amit’s. In Israel, IDF orphans are held in a warm embrace of national gratitude, receiving specialized institutional support, communal recognition, and dedicated retreats. In a blended home, this can inadvertently create a two-tiered emotional ecosystem under one roof. One group of children carries a highly visible, publicly honored legacy of sacrifice, while their step-siblings navigate a quiet, private loss. Left unaddressed, this stark difference in institutional recognition can foster deep undercurrents of confusion and marital friction.
Amit reflects on the immense dedication required to stabilize this reality: “Couples who marry for a second time really work at it. Their jobs are secondary compared to what they are doing inside the home. It’s a daily, constant job. It’s not simple when each family unit is dealing with its own trauma, and even harder when it also entails fusing different upbringings, behaviors, and histories.”
Enter Kuma: the structural anchor
Protecting the fragile hope of a newly blended family takes more than raw courage; it requires a tender, steady hand to hold them up. This is exactly where Kuma, a specialized program by Sulamot, steps in, scaling its embrace to mentor and support Swords of Iron IDF widows who remarry. This process is led jointly by Kuma’s senior advisor, Shlomit Kalmanzon, herself an October 7th widow who recently remarried, and Lirit Lopez, a Kuma financial advisor and rights specialist.
Kuma operates on a proactive philosophy, recognizing that people who experience trauma often lack the executive function to initiate long-term planning. Kuma’s team does not wait for an application; they reach out directly. But timing is a delicate art. Had she met with Kuma in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death, Yael shares that she would have fled. The team waited, persistently and gently reaching out until she was ready to choose a goal.
“I got a lot of offers of help and felt overwhelmed because I didn’t know where to turn,” Yael recalls. Though her family wanted to help, sharing bank statements with those closest to her felt too emotionally overwhelming. “Even from my first meeting with Lirit, I could tell that Kuma has both the professionalism and warmth I need. She listened, and I opened up to her because there was no obligated closeness. She wasn’t a friend, family, or a psychologist, so I felt more comfortable.”
Having an objective third party became key for Yael. Lirit was an anchor, backed by an entire strategic staff. Beyond macro-budgeting, Kuma became a practical lifeline for the minutiae of daily administration. When Yael faced the overwhelming task of filling out a complex corporate Form 101, a tax document made infinitely more complicated by her shifting marital status and state stipends, she snapped a photo of the form and sent it via WhatsApp to Lirit. Within minutes, Lirit messaged back with clear, granular directions on exactly which boxes to check.
“This is Kuma’s operational reality,” explains Shlomit Peretz, Kuma’s program manager and a veteran IDF widow. “We break down the grand concept of ‘rehabilitation’ into tiny, accessible everyday victories.”
When the wedding music stopped for Yael and Amit, Kuma did not step away. Instead, they remained alongside them, providing the same steady support for this new and precarious phase of life. In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, Kuma is known for providing essential, short-term practical relief, stabilizing the home by bridging the immediate operational gaps that state systems miss, whether that means securing temporary household help to let a grieving mother breathe or helping cover the sudden costs of relocating from a site of trauma.
“When an IDF widow’s family shifts into a blended household, Kuma’s guidance evolves from emergency relief into long-term strategic architectural support,” emphasizes Shlomit Kalmanzon. The internal economics of a blended family require immense strategic navigation. To address this, Kuma brings both partners into intensive financial mapping sessions to meticulously untangle their assets and design a healthy boundary between past legacy and future unity.
The first step Kuma recommends is for the couple to implement a legal prenuptial agreement (heskem mamon). Through this mechanism, Kuma helps new couples protect the fallen father’s estate and state funds, securing them strictly for his biological children’s long-term futures. With the inheritance safely set aside, Lirit then guides the couple toward a healthy balance in merging their monthly household economy, creating a single, unified front for daily expenses, groceries, and family life. By drawing a clear line between the past estate and the present budget, Kuma works to eliminate the primary source of financial suspicion that tears many second marriages apart.
Kuma also ensures that couples do not navigate the psychological strain of this transition alone. The organization’s financial coaches work alongside clinical social workers who understand the psychological trauma driving spending habits and avoidance behavior. Financial stability and relationship health are entirely interwoven; one cannot succeed without the other.
For Yael, the presence of these mentors transformed her outlook entirely. “There are people you meet and you feel they are messengers sent by Hashem,” Yael shares, invoking Naomi Shemer’s timeless imagery of “good people along the way.”
Kuma’s approach reflects the very meaning of its parent organization’s name, Sulamot, “ladders.” Yael identifies this vertical movement as the core of the organization’s impact: “Kuma helps you rise. They help you choose a goal, and it’s like you’re climbing the ladder to get out of where you were.” It is a ladder lowered into a dark pit, offering a way out of survival mode and into a life of calm, deliberate planning, restoring to these women the agency to shape their own futures.
For the founder of Sulamot, Rav Yosef Zvi Rimon, the strategic mission of Kuma is nothing less than a spiritual and historical imperative for the Jewish people. His vision elevates the grueling daily work of budgeting, legal contracts, and step-parenting into an act of supreme national significance. “When a widow successfully remarries, this is a national success that extends beyond the new couple’s personal home,” says Rav Rimon.
In a society where grief can easily trap a person in place, Rav Rimon reframes the decision of these families to love again, to choose life, and to build a home as the ultimate triumph over destruction. “It is by their merit, and the merit of all the soldiers’ wives and their families, that the State of Israel was saved. The rebuilding of their homes after unimaginable loss is binyan ha-uma, an integral part of rebuilding the nation. It is the next stage of our ultimate victory in this war.”
By pairing the raw human courage of families like Yael and Amit’s with the practical financial architecture of Kuma and the peer mentorship of figures like Shlomit Kalmanzon and Shlomit Peretz, Israeli society is being handed the tools to step over the broken glass of tragedy, pick up the hammer, and build the next floor of national resilience.
Yael and Amit’s names have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
Inbar Gabay Zada is the Director of Development at Sulamot.
Heroes Fell. Heroines Rise. Learn more about Kuma: kuma.sulamot.org/en/eng/.