Raised in a British Satmar community that rejected Zionism, Shalom Avitan found a new purpose after witnessing extraordinary acts of courage and brotherhood during the October 7 massacre, leading him from volunteer medic to combat soldier and Israel Police officer.
By Hezy Laing
A wounded Israeli reservist at Kibbutz Kfar Aza had every reason to demand immediate medical attention. Instead, despite being shot in the leg and suffering shrapnel wounds throughout his body, he insisted that the young medic treating him first attend to his more seriously injured comrade.
The soldier pushed Shalom Avitan against the ambulance and refused to put his own needs ahead of his friend.
“Then and there I decided to make a switch in my life,” Avitan later told JNS. “Out of compassion, camaraderie and altruism, he was willing to give up his own treatment for his friend.”
For the 23-year-old medic, the encounter on October 7, 2023, became a turning point. Within weeks, he would walk into an IDF recruitment office and announce that he wanted to serve in a combat unit.
His journey there had been anything but conventional.
A childhood far from Zionism
Avitan grew up in Manchester, England, in an ultra-Orthodox family associated with the Satmar movement, a Hasidic community known for its opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.
At his yeshiva, military service in the IDF was considered unacceptable, and the idea of joining Israel’s armed forces was entirely outside the world in which he had been raised.
His connection to Israel, however, was already part of his family history. His English father had met his Israeli mother in Jerusalem, and the family returned to Manchester shortly after Shalom was born.
At 18, Avitan moved to Israel to continue his religious studies at a yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood. Two years later, he began looking for a different direction and started volunteering with United Hatzalah, Israel’s volunteer emergency medical service.
The decision to build a life in Israel was not warmly received by his family. In a December 2023 interview with Ynet, Avitan described the personal distance that developed after he chose a path so different from the one in which he had grown up.
The cost became especially apparent on October 7. While other volunteers received worried calls from relatives checking that they were safe, nobody from Avitan’s family called him that night.
The following day, Eli Beer, president of United Hatzalah, personally contacted him to make sure he was all right. Avitan said the call gave him strength, knowing that the organization and its leadership stood behind him.
Into the horrors of October 7
On the morning of the Hamas massacre, Avitan was on his way to synagogue when his phone rang. United Hatzalah’s emergency dispatch center instructed him to head south, initially warning him about rocket attacks.
He soon realized that something far worse was unfolding.
His first stop was H̱aletz Junction, where he and his team provided emergency treatment to a soldier who had been shot in the abdomen. They transported him to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where the scale of the disaster became impossible to ignore.
The hospital’s emergency department was overwhelmed, with doctors and nurses struggling to treat the flood of casualties.
Avitan and the physician accompanying him helped get the wounded soldier onto a hospital bed and began treating him.
From there, they continued to Sderot, where the streets were filled with bodies. With relatively few survivors still waiting for medical attention in the areas they were searching, Avitan and other volunteers began collecting the dead and protecting their dignity.
They were working near the city’s police station when gunfire erupted from terrorists inside the building.
Then came another urgent call: dozens of wounded people needed help at Kfar Aza.
Avitan made a decision to leave the work of recovering bodies and head to the kibbutz. As he explained to Ynet, saving lives had to come first.
The babies and the commander
At Kfar Aza, Avitan encountered scenes of devastation. The ambulance team had to navigate around bodies along the roads as they made their way through the community.
At one point, they stopped to help a distraught mother recover her murdered son, whom she recognized by his shoes and necklace.
While treating casualties, Avitan encountered Lt. Col. Tomer Greenberg, commander of Golani’s 13th Battalion. Greenberg handed him two infants, just 10 months old, and told him that their parents had been murdered.
The twins had been hidden by their parents in a safe room. They remained there alone for approximately 12 hours before Israeli soldiers found and rescued them.
When Avitan received them, the babies were dehydrated, frightened and crying. He and the other volunteers gave them water and held them close.
“They were so thirsty and clutching on to us so hard,” he told Britain’s Jewish News in an interview just one week after the massacre.
The twins were eventually transferred to social services and reunited with surviving family members. A photograph of Avitan holding the two children became one of the widely shared images from the October 7 tragedy.
Greenberg, who commanded the battalion that helped protect civilians during the massacre, was later killed fighting in the Gaza Strip.
For Avitan, caring for the children was a moment of comfort amid the destruction. “I knew that this was my mission to take care of the babies,” he told JNS. “It was a very comforting moment amid all the tragedy.”
The soldier who changed everything
The rescue of the twins was not the only experience that stayed with Avitan.
During the fighting at Kfar Aza, he treated several wounded reservists, including the soldier who refused to receive treatment before his more seriously injured comrade.
The second soldier, who was unconscious, later died from his injuries.
The sight of one wounded man putting his friend’s life ahead of his own made a profound impression on Avitan. He saw a level of brotherhood and selflessness that he wanted to make part of his own life.
A few weeks later, he arrived at the IDF recruitment office in Jerusalem.
The young man who had spent much of his life studying in yeshiva told the recruitment clerk that he wanted to join a combat unit. When she suggested that he might consider a non-combat position, he made his intentions unmistakable.
“I told her that there was no chance I would be in non-combat,” he recalled.
His parents were unhappy with the decision, but Avitan went ahead. He served for two and a half years in a combat unit, including a period as a squad leader.
A new calling in the Israel Police
Completing his military service in May 2026 did not mean the end of Avitan’s commitment to public service.
The following month, he joined the Israel Police’s Special Patrol Unit, an operational force that works to prevent terrorist attacks and respond to security threats.
He was determined to move directly into another role protecting the country rather than taking time away after his army service.
“When you know what you want to do in life, you don’t wait too much,” he told JNS. “When you finish the army at 26, you don’t have time to fall in love with Thailand. I knew what my path is.”
His commitment and performance were recently recognized when he received an award for excellence during his Israel Police training course.
Avitan’s girlfriend supports his decision to continue in security service. The couple plans to marry next year.
Yet the memories of October 7 remain with him, particularly the people who did not survive that day.
“You ask yourself why me and not them?” he said, reflecting on the soldiers and civilians who lost their lives. “It has to come from your own will and choice.”
The reservist who put his comrade first had shown Avitan something he had never experienced so directly: the extraordinary responsibility Jews feel toward one another.
“I feel it is my calling,” Avitan said. “You come home—and you feel fulfilled.”
