'Sketches of Resilience': Artwork supporting the families of fallen IDF soldiers

On October 7, Efrat Silberhaft and her family were in Vienna on their way to the synagogue where her father is the cantor. Since it was Shabbat and they didn’t have any phones with them, they were informed by the security guards at the synagogue about the Hamas attack. When she and her husband, Yossi, and their two toddlers managed to return to Israel as soon as possible, Yossi was immediately called up to serve in the reserves in the Golani Brigade.

Home alone for eight months, with no school for the children, Efrat started sketching as a way of coping with the stress and isolation. Her drawings became a form of diary entries: Each one was dated with a caption that described not what was happening in the war but her own situation and feelings. “I found solace in sketching my feelings and emotions when my husband was called up to the army,” she relates. One sketch, for example, shows her toddler son playing on a blanket, oblivious, of course, to all the scenes going through her mind. 

Efrat lives in Ra’anana and works in Tel Aviv as a designer for the American cybersecurity company Imperva. When she began sharing her sketches on her Instagram account, she discovered that many other people identified with her feelings. “I continued sketching, which gave me the strength to persevere,” she says. Her company expressed interest in producing a book for Imperva employees. After publishing the book and showing it to her friends outside the company, the friends expressed interest as well. This prompted her to publish the book privately with a slightly different design, aiming to raise money for widows and orphans of reservists.

The result is her newly published Sketches of Resilience, the proceeds of which will be donated to widows and orphans of IDF reservists through the IDF Widows & Orphans organization (IDFWO). 

Who is Efrat Silberhaft?

Born in Israel, Efrat grew up in Vienna in an artistic Israeli family. Her father, Shmuel Barzilai, is the chief cantor of the Vienna Jewish Community; her mother, Dvora Barzilai, is a sculptress and painter. At 19, Efrat moved back to Israel by herself and studied interactive communications at university.

“A friend of mine who knows many widows of fallen soldiers gave me the idea of raising money through the sale of the book to contribute in some way to war widows,” she says.■

For more information: https://www.sketchesofresilience.com 

For more about the IDFWO: https://idfwo.org/en/