“As a sergeant, I asked which supplies had to get wet on a rainy night. As a social worker, I passed among the soldiers to offer them blankets and to emphasize that everyone should look after their friends. As a sergeant, after mortar fire, I checked that no one was hurt. As a social worker, that check was a connection between friends during a time of distress. Reserve duty left me with thoughts about the place within me of those two parts. In the return to routine, I finished my role as platoon sergeant. In the meantime, it seems that the entire country needs a little bit more of the social worker role, strengthening and dealing with trauma.”
Those words were written last March by Sgt.-Maj. (Res.) Yishai Greenbaum, who died on Saturday from injuries sustained earlier this month fighting in Lebanon. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery of Mount Herzl on Sunday.
When he wasn’t serving in the military reserves as a platoon sergeant in the Alon Brigade’s 5030th Battalion, Greenbaum was a municipal social worker in Lod, where he ran the city’s center for domestic violence victims and treated soldiers who had experienced trauma.
Greenbaum leaves behind a wife and four small children, the youngest less than one year old.
“Yishai fell in a battle defending his homeland and the country he loved so much,” Greenbaum’s wife Hadas wrote. “On Saturday, the world lost someone precious.”
The family announced that Greenbaum’s organs would be donated. His sister Penina Efrati has been a nurse in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit at Schneider Children’s Medical Center for many years and has seen firsthand how organ donation saves lives. “In these difficult hours of recognizing the severity of his injuries, we had the clear knowledge that his desire was to be good to others in death just as he did in life,” Efrati said. “Despite the infinite pain of losing my young brother, we all felt as one—his wife Hadas, my parents and all my siblings—that we had stumbled upon the opportunity and the privilege to save the lives of other people.”
Efrati noted that Greenbaum had an Adi organ donor card expressing his desire for his organs to be donated after his death. She expressed her wish for a speedy recovery to those who had received her brother’s organs and called on Israelis to apply for their own Adi organ donation card.
As a teenager, Greenbaum volunteered with the Kav Lachayim organization, which organizes camps, trips, and other gatherings for children with complex disabilities. Later on, he served as the coordinator of the organization’s branch in northern Israel. “Yishai was a people person,” Kav Lachayim said of Greenbaum. “Tens of thousands prayed for his recovery. Hundreds performed the ritual separation of challah for his health. Yishai touched all of us with his blue eyes, his wide smile, and his golden curls. It’s a great loss for his parents, his wife, his children, and the nation of Israel.”
Inbal Hermoni, president of the Israeli social workers union, described Greenabum as “an excellent social worker who loved humanity and was devoted to his work.” “As manager of the center for treatment of domestic violence in Lod, his commitment to populations of women and children experiencing violence, especially in Arab society, was very evident. Yishai was very valued and loved by his colleagues, partners, and patients. May his memory be for a blessing.”
The Welfare Ministry also expressed its condolences. “Yishai was a devoted social worker in the Lod municipality and a combat soldier in the reserves who went out to defend the residents of the north and all the citizens of the state,” the ministry said. “We’re sending condolences from deep in our hearts to his wife Hadas, his children, his relatives, his coworkers at the social services division in the Lod municipality, and all his loved ones.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
