‘One day you’re an IDF soldier,” says Yaniv Leidner, CEO of Brothers for Life. “You’re an officer, you’re strong, holding a weapon, wearing your uniform. You feel like Superman. Then you’re wounded, and the next day you’re lying in bed, helpless.
“You need assistance just to get out of bed to use the bathroom. The pain is real. This dramatic change is incredibly jarring. There’s the physical aspect of the injury, of course, but also the mental aspect is extremely significant.”
This is the unlikely story of the creation of Brothers for Life (BFL), a nonprofit organization founded and run by wounded Israeli veterans to provide critical and immediate help to other wounded Israeli combat veterans.
Becoming Brothers
In 2004, Leidner and Gil Ganonyan, officers in the IDF’s Duvdevan unit, were seriously wounded in separate incidents during their military service. Both recovered, returned to their units, and were discharged in 2005. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2006, the Second Lebanon War broke out, in which many soldiers were seriously wounded.
During that summer, almost 11,000 km. (6,820 miles) away, in Seattle, Washington, Rabbi Chaim Levine, today BFL’s president, who headed a Jewish educational program for adults at the time, was reading the news about the high IDF casualty count.
“I couldn’t just sit here reading about this and doing nothing,” recalls Levine. “I had a platform, and I called up my 50 best friends in Seattle and said, ‘We’re going to Israel. Will you come with me?’”
A week later, Levine, along with several friends, arrived in Israel and went directly to the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, where the wounded were being brought by helicopter from the front in Lebanon. “We were full of excitement and adrenaline, ready to help,” he recounts.
When Levine and his group saw dozens of gurneys, ready for the wave of incoming wounded, they grasped the severity of the situation. They began to visit the wounded soldiers, giving them MP3 players that they had brought from the United States.
However, Levine realized that despite their best intentions, they could not give the hospitalized soldiers what they needed. “It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to make a difference in that way,” says Levine.
Accompanying Levine and his group was a friend of Levine’s who had visited Seattle the previous year – the aforementioned Ganonyan, then a 25-year-old law student, today Brothers for Life’s executive chairman.
“I saw Gili start to talk to the soldiers who were conscious,” says Levine. “If they weren’t conscious, he spoke to their parents. He pulled down his collar and showed them his wound, where a bullet had passed through his neck, and he said, ‘I promise you – your life is not going to end here.’ If the soldier was unconscious, he told the parents, ‘Your son will be able to get up and walk and live like I did.’”
It was at that moment that Levine realized that Ganonyan and other soldiers who had been wounded and recovered could do something for those lying in the beds that no one else could do. Ganonyan had lived through the pain and suffering of being seriously wounded, and the wounded soldiers lying in the hospital beds could see themselves in him.
Levine encouraged Ganonyan to continue visiting the wounded soldiers and promised that he would provide all other necessary means of assistance.
Several months after the war ended, Levine decided to bring a group of nine soldiers they had met at Rambam to Seattle for a week of rest and relaxation. The soldiers were placed with Jewish host families, and he says the results were magical – for both the soldiers and the families.
“They literally transformed from being closed down, shut down, and really in pain,” says Levine, “to actually enjoying the moment, finding hope, and seeing a future.
“It was unbelievable to me what had happened in the span of seven days, both in the way they healed each other and in the way the host families opened their hearts with so much love for them. I knew that this was the answer – that we could help them in ways no one else could,” he says.
“It was a week of healing – community engagement, love, and deep connections among the soldiers,” says Leidner, who accompanied Ganonyan on the trip. That week sparked the vision for the organization.
After returning to Israel, Leidner and Ganonyan began organizing informal events for wounded soldiers, such as dinners, day trips, and parties for Hanukkah and Purim. In June of 2008, Brothers for Life (Achim L’Chaim) was officially established.
Inside BFL
Until Oct. 7, 2023, the organization’s membership consisted of approximately 1,200 members, all IDF veterans who had been wounded in battle.
Since then, membership has doubled to 2,500, and BFL will continue to absorb at least 700 newly wounded soldiers annually for the foreseeable future, an increase of 700% over pre-Oct. 7.
“All of our work from the outset until Oct. 7,” says Leidner, “prepared us for that date in terms of understanding the nature of the wounded soldier.”
Brothers for Life rapidly expanded its team of hospital visitors – all wounded veterans – from 20 to 150 and began deploying them to hospitals immediately. Levine says that BFL members have made more than 25,000 hospital visits since October of 2023.
“When a soldier from BFL walks into the hospital room,” says Levine, “that’s the person the wounded soldier wants to talk to.”
He points out that the organization attempts to match, as best it can, the injuries that the visitor suffered with those of the wounded soldier in the hospital bed. “If you’re a soldier who just lost your eyesight and you’re 21 years old, you don’t know what the future is going to hold. In walks another soldier, 10 years older than you, who’s blind, with the same injury, who is married and has children and rides horses and runs and does everything he possibly can do. At that point, the soldiers see their future in the soul of the mentor who came to visit them.”
While hospital visits are the first and most immediate action the organization takes, Brothers for Life works to support wounded IDF soldiers in all aspects of their lives after their discharge.
Leidner points out that soldiers receive a personalized support package from the organization tailored to their age, situation, and needs. He notes that a wounded 19-year-old has different needs than a 38-year-old married reservist with children. Female soldiers wounded in battle receive the same level of service as their male counterparts.
The organization’s core is comprised of its social activities and frameworks, sports groups such as running, basketball, soccer, and CrossFit workshops, arts, music, writing, and holiday events, retreats, and other physical challenges, which includes BFL’s upcoming trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. The goal of these activities, Leidner explains, is to restore self-confidence and provide the soldiers with a sense of security by pushing their boundaries.
In addition to providing medical assistance, in the treatment of both physical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), BFL assists its members with financial counseling, education, and interest-free loans.
In September of 2024, Brothers for Life, in collaboration with Sheba Medical Center, organized the three-day international medical conference Advances in Orthoplastic Amputation Care. It featured lectures, workshops, and demonstrations by top surgeons from around the world. At the conclusion of the conference, dozens of IDF soldiers underwent medical evaluations ahead of surgeries that were to be performed jointly by American and Israeli experts.
Global integration
Another of BFL’s noteworthy characteristics is its integration of Jewish communities worldwide in support of wounded IDF veterans.
Since the first trip to Seattle in 2007, BFL has taken wounded veterans to cities across the United States and other countries, where they get to know members of the Jewish community and rehabilitate, rest, and recharge their batteries. But it is not a one-way street. Members of the Jewish communities who have hosted wounded IDF veterans have shared outstanding experiences with them.
Robert Sulkin, an attorney living in Seattle, accompanied Rabbi Levine on the 2006 trip to Rambam Medical Center, hosted the first group of IDF soldiers, and has never looked back. Two years ago, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with them and will be accompanying them to Aspen this year.
Reflecting on the willingness of members of Jewish communities worldwide to host wounded IDF soldiers whom they have never met, Sulkin says: “This shows the love of the Jewish people and the unity of the Jewish people. We’ve had soldiers in wheelchairs, we’ve had soldiers without limbs, we’ve had soldiers with severe mental issues. For the soldiers, it is an extraordinarily bonding experience, and the families get so much out of it.”
What do the families get out of hosting the soldiers?
Sulkin explains, “They learn the deep gift of giving – not of money but of yourself and your time. Second, they learn about peoplehood – that we’re a people, we’re all related to each other, and we love one another. Third, their kids learn more about Israel in those seven days than they’ll learn on any other adventure they take. The soldiers become part of their family.”
Brothers for Life takes groups of wounded IDF veterans on 15 and 20 trips annually, bringing them to cities such as New York, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Mexico City, and London. In addition to visiting local attractions there, soldiers meet and speak with members of the local Jewish community.
BFL has centers for its members in Tel Aviv and Kibbutz Alonim in Israel’s North and will be opening a new center in the South, in Kibbutz Mishmar HaNegev.
Perhaps the organization can be best summed up in one section from its manifesto, which reads:
“We are Brothers for Life. We are Jews, Druze, and Bedouin, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Ethiopian and Russian, religious and secular. We have come together to first heal and then inspire and to help others do so. We start at the hospital whenever a combat soldier is injured and don’t stop until that soldier has reclaimed his life and is ready to help improve the life of another soldier who is suffering as he was.”
Leidner concludes, “The words ‘Choose life’ are engraved on the gates of our headquarters. Even in the midst of trauma, we focus on healing. We believe in joy, positivity, and going forward.”
This article was written in cooperation with Brothers for Life