Sergeant Itay Amar was nineteen when he fell in combat in the southern Gaza Strip in June 2024, along with seven of his peers. After receiving his locked iPhone among his belongings, his mother, Lorin, tried to open it, insisting he must have left some kind of message behind. “He left one . . . I know my son. That’s what he was like his whole life, keeping me posted. It couldn’t be that he’d go in and not leave anything behind. It wouldn’t be grandiose, maybe just one sentence, but it would be there.”
Eventually Lorin got into the phone, and found a short last note: “Stay happy for me.” The words comforted her and the rest of Itay’s family and were engraved on his tombstone.
Like most armies, the IDF does not require soldiers to write letters of farewell to their families before entering combat. Still, these letters are written, on scraps of paper, unsent emails, or Google documents.
In 2024, copywriter Shlomo Kavas and journalist Racheli Palant-Rozen decided to collect and preserve these notes, working with researchers to contact each fallen soldier’s family. The result was If You’re Reading These Words, a book of forty-nine letters presented largely unedited, with notes explaining the context of each letter: inside jokes, family legends, quotations from songs, poems, and the Bible. Each letter is introduced with a brief biography of the soldier, a record of how they fell in combat, and an artist’s sketch of their face in blue and white. President Isaac Herzog wrote the Foreword, and interspersed throughout are essays by a wide range of Israeli public figures, from freed hostage Emily Damari and Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff to spiritual influencer Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi and singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai, offering their own kind of running narrative of tragedy and hope.
The book was first published in Hebrew in 2025 and was an immediate bestseller. Comedian and journalist Hanoch Daum called it “one of the most important war books ever published in Israel.”
For the full review see The Jewish Review of Books.
