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A Home for Broken Soldiers
(Jerusalem Post) Erik Schechter - In July 2002, a raid on a hidden explosives lab in the West Bank city of Kalkilya turned into a bloody stalemate, and a company commander, Capt. Shlomi Cohen, was dying on the third floor of a building, his troops unable to reach him. Ro'i Yablochnik rounded up eight soldiers for a rescue mission. But as they climbed to the second floor, a grenade rolled down the stairwell and exploded. "The shrapnel hit me in the face," he says. While a medic was working on him, he saw a shadowy figure in a doorway. Yablochnik and his medic shot the Palestinian gunman, but "the terrorist shot me in the left shoulder," he says. For thousands of wounded soldiers like Yablochnik, help in making it down the road to recovery comes from the IDF Disabled Veterans Association, that provides soldiers with the tools they need to put their lives back together. The group runs three Beit Halohem rehabilitation centers in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem and is currently building a new one in Beersheba. The Beit Halohem center in Tel Aviv has all the requisite physical therapy units, but there are no morose, elderly patients in gowns being led around by nurses. Rather, the rehab center seems more like an upscale social club than anything else. By bringing together so many wounded vets, the association provides an environment where no one stands out as a curiosity. The children of the handicapped see there is no shame in having a father who might be missing an arm, while someone who has not yet started a family is reassured that his life is not over. "Someone who has lost both legs can see someone else in the same situation and see that he has a wife, a family," says Yablochnik. Two years after his injuries, Yablochnik returned to his old infantry unit as the battalion's operations officer.