Nearly a year has passed since Staff Sgt. Yam Frid, a Golani reconnaissance soldier from the settlement of Sela’it in the West Bank, was killed in battle in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on his 21st birthday. But his mother, Keren, still has not managed to read all of the journals and letters he left behind.
Some of them have become, for her, a kind of last testament. Others shed light on who he was: an exceptional young man whose life was cut short too soon.
Yam began writing journals while studying at the Upper Galilee pre-military academy. After his death, his parents discovered dozens of notebooks and pages in which he documented his thoughts. In one of them, he listed the values that guided him: caring, involvement, joy for life, diligence, growth and responsibility.
“This is the story of a boy driven by values,” his mother, Keren, said. “Yam was a perfect child. When I read what he wrote, that is exactly who he was. Yam loved the country and the army very much, and he believed in our presence here. He had no fear. He was a sports fanatic, enlisted in Shayetet and later moved to Golani.”
She added, “From 10th grade, he already had a burning desire to serve in a combat unit, and he trained and prepared for it. Friends would come to him for advice on how to get into pre-military academies and military units, and what training to do, and he helped everyone with care and patience. He absorbed values from home and from those around him, but he took them to a completely different level.”
According to his mother, only after Yam’s death did those close to him fully understand how deep his worldview was.
“I always knew he was an optimistic child, but when you read the path he went through and his approach to life, the desire to be the best version of himself, it is incredible,” she said. “We did not know he was writing texts about motivation, self-improvement and preserving experiences and processes he went through in his life.”
In one of his journal entries, Yam wrote about how life should be lived:
“To go with the flow, to live the academy, to enjoy every moment and not look at hours of sleep. Experiences are gained outside the bed. We won’t remember that night we slept 11 hours, but the night we ran to the stream, had fun, went in the water, and afterward made an oatmeal meal, which surprisingly was tasty, or the night we tied knots all over the yard and hung up the girls’ shoes. On both nights we didn’t sleep much, but we definitely gained more stories to tell, more experiences to laugh about and more moments together. I wish for all of us to be people without hours of sleep, but with a smile on our face and joy in our heart, and without regretting the things we didn’t do.”
“That is a different way of looking at life,” Keren said. “It is a kind of will. He believed we only live once, and that every moment has to be used. He could not understand how anyone could sit and do nothing. He was always pushing toward action.”
She said he also volunteered at a school while at the academy and helped children.
“Today, young people come to us and tell us that because of Yam they enlisted in combat units, because of Yam they passed the Shayetet selection process, and because of Yam they joined Golani,” she said. “In every framework he was part of, he led the sports field. He trained all the time, and he was highly focused on the army and the security forces.”
Yam, the eldest of three siblings, enlisted in December 2023 and was killed on his birthday.
“He was supposed to go to a squad commanders’ course a month earlier, but it was postponed again and again, and in the end it never happened,” Keren said. “He fought in Lebanon and in Gaza, and he had been waiting for that very much. While he was waiting to go to the course and his team was in Gaza, it was hard for him to sit on the sidelines. He told us, ‘Mom, Dad, I want to go into Gaza.’ He could not stay behind while his friends were inside.”
Keren added painfully, “As a mother, I had fears, but I did not think something like this would happen. There was always a sense of success around him. I was afraid he might be wounded, but not that he would be killed, and certainly not on his birthday. Instead of celebrating, we found ourselves at a funeral.
“Yam was a child with mesmerizing outward beauty, but his inner beauty and values far surpassed his appearance. I miss the hugs, the conversations and the best friend I had, and that is the hardest thing, the longing.”