Sargeant Rebecca, 21, is a combat soldier in the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps' 595th Battalion. She says that she made the decision to enlist in the IDF when she was only a little girl, as someone who grew up on stories about her uncle who fought and was injured in the Second Lebanon War.
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"Enlisting in the army has always been part of my plan. Everyone told me to go to college, but I said after high school I would come to Israel and enlist. When I finished 12th grade, I came here, did a preparatory year in Alumim, and in November '22 I enlisted," she recounts.
Rebecca grew up in New York, in a Zionist home with an Israeli father and American mother. She is the oldest of four children. In her childhood, the family lived for a period in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City, but when she was 11, the family returned to the United States.
"My father served in the Givati Brigade, but he told me to go to a girls' seminary rather than serve in the IDF; they were really afraid and didn't want me to enlist and tried to convince me to stay with them abroad, but I was determined. I announced that I was enlisting – and that was it."
On October 7, she was in Alumim and took shelter in a safe room when terrorists infiltrated the kibbutz. "I saw the terrorists and the forces fighting them," she recounts. At one point she assisted in treating the wounded.
It was difficult for her to return to the army, but after a short break, she returned and is with her battalion in the north, gathering intelligence in the field. "It was important for me to return and fight despite the difficulty and despite what I went through on that dark Shabbat," she says. Her host family from the kibbutz was evacuated to Netanya and she has visited them several times.
She came to Alumim for a visit right before returning to the army. Today she lives with roommates in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood of Jerusalem.
After what happened in the Gaza border communities, she is even more determined to make sure that what happened in the south does not happen in the north. "I hope we can defend ourselves properly and that the worst does not happen. Everything that happened to us only made me feel even more correct in my decision to enlist in the army. We must not forget what happened to us. We need to continue fighting here. We don't have any other country that's ours."
