It will be a very different kind of Yom ha-Zikaron in Israel for the family of Ben Brown. In July 2024, a Hezbollah rocket injured the 20-year-old from Thornhill, Ont., while he was on duty with the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani army unit at a strategic base overlooking the Lebanese border. No one else was hurt or killed.
Now, as the Jewish State remembers more than 25,000 soldiers and also victims of terrorism who’ve fallen throughout Israel’s history for its memorial day, Brown’s family is commemorating in their own way—on the ground in Israel, where their son is still in hospital. Brown has spent months receiving treatment, after being in a coma, with a traumatic brain injury. The former yeshiva student is out of danger now, but he still receives hours of daily therapy. His family and friends keep a constant vigil, as he cannot yet speak properly for long, or walk distances unassisted.
Despite a controversial progressive media website publicly listing Ben Brown among 85 Canadians who’ve served in the IDF over the years, Brown’s family says they’re not focusing on the unwanted negative attention. Instead, the family is marking Israel’s Memorial Day together in Israel, and plan to attend local events—including the 77th anniversary of Israel’s independence the following day.
They want Canadians back home to understand why their son felt he had to defend the Jewish State—especially after Oct. 7. On today’s The CJN Daily, Ben Brown’s father, Jeffrey Brown, joins from Israel to explain.
Transcript
Ellin Bessner: The piercing blast of a siren Tuesday evening in Israel at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, was not signalling new incoming terrorist attacks..instead this was the beginning of the official ceremony for Yom ha-Zikaron. The national Memorial Day for the 25,000 soldiers and security personnel who have fallen throughout Israel’s history. The country’s president and top military leaders stood marking the televised event.
While many Canadian Jews will mark the day by attending similar events across the country, one Toronto family is spending it in a way that is even more personal.
The family of wounded Canadian soldier Ben Brown is also in Israel this week. They planned to mark the solemn day in a low key manner, as their 20-year-old son is not yet recovered enough to join them at large public outdoor ceremonies.
Ben has been in Israeli hospitals for the past 9 months..since July 2024…when the Golani brigade combat soldier was hit in the head by shrapnel from a Hezbollah rocket fired from Lebanon. Although most of the war since Oct 7 has been going on in Gaza to the south, Hezblloah terrorists began almost daily rocket barrages into northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas..and Ben’s unit was sent to a strategically located IDF army base located on a mountain top in the Golan heights.. within shouting distance of the Lebanese border..
Brown was the only one hurt that day in the attack.. He required several rounds of neurosurgery for his brain injury..he had to be in a medically induced coma for some time, and when he was out of danger -they moved him to a rehabilitation centre – where he undergoes hours of therapy each day..although just recently he was been able leave the hospital for a short while to spend Passover with him parents and older brother
And while the country focuses today on those who didn’t come home, including about 900 soldiers killed just since the Israel-Hamas war started…the Brown family wants people to also think about the sacrifices made by those like their son – 16,000 Israeli soldiers wounded in the conflict.
I’m Ellin Bessner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Wednesday April 30 2025. Welcome to The CJN Daily a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Ben Brown grew up in Toronto. Attended Jewish private day school..as did his older brother who Ben eventually followed to Israel. While the Browns’ parents take great pride in their sons’service, including Zach’s in 2021 during the last Israel Hamas war, the Canadian brothers’ decision to join up with the IDF has not been universally celebrated. One Canadian website critical of the IDF’s actions in Gaza published a list of 85 names of Canadians who had served in Israel ..dating back nearly 80 years….both boys’ names are included..The writers took a lot of information from us at The CJN and our stories including soon after Ben was wounded, reporting how their synagogue and school communities in Toronto began holding prayer vigils..
Despite this unwanted negative spotlight from Canada, and the family’s preliminary discussions about whether to try to sue the website or at least shut it down, that’s not a priority right now for the Brown family..who agreed to update us their wounded son’s journey and whats’ next. Benji, as they call him. isn’t yet well enough to carry on a long conversation with me, so his father Jeffrey Brown joins from Raanana Israel.
Ellin Bessner: Welcome to The CJN Daily. Where am I reaching you?
Jeffrey Brown: I’m in Ra’anana, actually, and there’s a lounge upstairs in the rehab centre for the soldiers, which is where our son is at. It’s empty right now. There’s fortunately fewer and fewer soldiers here because there hasn’t been so much conflict. So there’s not people coming and going, but there are still quite a few here—too many, including our son.
Ellin Bessner: You were in Haifa for a while. When or how long ago did Ben transfer to Ra’anana?
Jeffrey Brown: Okay, so Benjamin arrived in Haifa in July, and near the end of the third week of July, he was med-flight from his post up in Har Dov, which is on the Lebanon-Syria border, after a Hezbollah missile attack on his base. He went right to Rambam in Haifa. He was in Haifa from July until October 1, when he was well enough to transfer to rehab. He’s been in rehab since October 1st and will stay here until he’s ready to go, which they’re actively working on.
Ellin Bessner: So nine months, just this week since the injury, correct?
Jeffrey Brown: Correct.
Ellin Bessner: Wow. But you’re closer now in Ra’anana. You guys are staying there temporarily, visiting him.
Jeffrey Brown: Exactly correct. Everything is coordinated through the Ministry of Defence and through One Family Fund and a bunch of friends and family, some of whom were friends we didn’t even know we had before. You really see people step up and help in times of need. We’ve never felt wanting for lack of help, support, assistance or anything. Thank God he’s here and has been treated with compassion, love, great medical care, and therapy by everybody involved, most of whom, I will add, are not Jewish.
Ellin Bessner: I wanted to ask you about that. On your social media posts, you were giving gifts during Ramadan to some of the staff. Tell us what that’s like, having Israeli non-Jews being responsible for your family, for your son’s rehab.
Jeffrey Brown: Quite frankly, they’re the majority of caregivers, whether they’re physicians, nurses, support staff or personal orderlies. There are all types, and none of it really seems to matter. We’re very happy. We feel that everybody is treating our son professionally and with respect and compassion, with an end goal of getting him back to where he was before.
Ellin Bessner: Can you describe your daily routine and Ben’s?
Jeffrey Brown: Well, Ben’s typical routine is evolving as Benjamin gets better. But Ben’s typical routine, he gets up at 7:30 or 8:00, gets cleaned up, gets showered, eats breakfast, and there’s a therapy schedule. It started out with maybe a few hours of therapy a day, and Benjamin’s probably getting close to five or six hours of therapy a day now as they’re really pushing him. Also, a lot of self-therapy comes from my wife Annette, who’s really the one who coordinates everything, myself and a bunch of Benji’s friends, and our oldest son Zachary, as you know, lives nearby in Herzliya with his wife. Zachary has coordinated a schedule so that somebody’s always here helping Benjamin out if it’s not myself. It’s been pretty remarkable because it’s one thing just to rely on the hospital staff—you really can’t do it because they can’t be with you 24. You need to have friends and family with you, and Benjamin always has that.
Benjamin’s now starting to get out for Shabbat and for Yom Tov, so we all went away as a family for Passover together. He comes to the apartment nearby in Ra’anana that we now have, and he can come with us. We have somebody come as a personal care attendant who comes with us when we’re away because there are some things that Benjamin does not want us doing to help him. So we have somebody who helps him with that as well. We’re getting there. It’s been a long haul. It’s a long, exhaustive haul for Benjamin, but he’s really coming along, and he’ll be 200% by the time he’s done with this.
Ellin Bessner: What is left for him to be able to recover?
Jeffrey Brown: Benjamin is not totally independent yet in everything. He’s walking, but he needs, you know, support around him in case he, you know, loses it. He feeds himself, but he needs help with some of his personal care. He’s quite communicative and fully cognitive of everything. One of the last things to come back was his speech, but his speech is coming back.
Ellin Bessner: This is all because of being in a coma. Is that why? The medically induced coma?
Jeffrey Brown: He had a brain injury, and there are commonalities with brain injuries, but each one is quite unique. There are other soldiers here that came in about the same time, and they’re all in different places in terms of where their rehab is. But it’s beautiful to see everybody making progress; it’s truly remarkable. So we’re well along. I can’t imagine, you know, if you think about the journey that Ben has been through, that we’ve been through, from a coma to where it’s like we’re contemplating next steps where he’s out of rehab, he’s independent, and he’s going to be able to go to school and continue with his original plans. That’s the end goal with everything. No reason to think that’s not going to be.
Ellin Bessner: Maybe some listeners who are not Jewish might not understand what the pull was for lone soldiers or Canadian kids to want to join the IDF. Especially now, since October 7th. What do you know through your son’s decisions, what that meant to them, why they wanted to do that?
Jeffrey Brown: So Zachary made his decision to join the army when he was in yeshiva. They do these day trips or overnight called tiyulim, and his bus was stopped because there had just been a terror attack on the road that he was on. He drove by a bus stop with dead Israelis. I think about this kid, he was what, 18, 19 years old? And this is what he sees. That was a connectivity for him; it’s like they’re attacking Jewish people because they’re Jewish. It’s like, I can’t ignore that. So that’s the reason why Zachary chose to go.
Benjamin’s a very different kid. His impetus to go was he did many of the yeshiva, do a side trip during the year. They go to Poland, they go to Auschwitz. It’s like the March of the Living. Benjamin went on March of the Living, and that was it for him. You know, he decided he wanted to stay in yeshiva extra and then do army service as well. The interesting stuff is, I think, only 10% of Israeli military personnel are combat soldiers, and the lone soldiers, a lot of them are combat soldiers, including both of my kids. Both Zachary and Benjamin had to do what they were put there for.
Ellin Bessner: Is there a Holocaust story in your family or your wife’s family?
Jeffrey Brown: Not in my family, but my wife’s parents are both survivors. Her father, alav ha-shalom, was an Auschwitz survivor, has the number on his arm. Her mother was in a work factory. My wife is from a Polish survivor family, and they ended up settling in Toronto like so many other people.
Ellin Bessner: This is why I was asking about Benji’s sort of connection to it.
And so we need to talk a bit about the other sort of news that was happening while you were worrying about whether Benji would ever walk again. This was when a Canadian newspaper published the identities of about 85 former IDF soldiers dating back, you know, generations, 30, 50, 70 years. And your guys were on there. You’re aware of this and we’re not going to give too much publicity to the effort, but what has that been like for you and your family when you learned of this? I think I actually told you about it.
Jeffrey Brown: I’m proud of my boys. My boys are serving their people and there’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. There are Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry that choose to go fight for just causes in Ukraine to this day. Why aren’t these people… that’s a good question, actually. Why aren’t the same people who are doxing people like those 85 Canadians, why are they not doxing other people who go do this elsewhere? We both know the answer to that question. So, no, I don’t care. My kids don’t care. My kids have done nothing wrong. They do nothing wrong. They’re very proud of what they’ve done. They serve their people with honour. You know, the person who wrote that article, I don’t think he can say that; my kids are net givers, not net takers. You know, I wonder how these people and all their protests and their investigative reports, I mean fund themselves.
Ellin Bessner: Was Benji aware that this was… he was part of this too?
Jeffrey Brown: Yeah, but I don’t really think it registers. Zachary knows more than Benjamin, and Benjamin never really cared about anything like that. He doesn’t read the newspaper, isn’t on social media or anything like that. That’s not who he is. And Zachary is aware of it, doesn’t care.
Ellin Bessner: It’s Yom HaZikaron in Israel. First of all, what, if anything, is your family doing? Are you part of any sort of commemoration events or how is it affecting you?
Jeffrey Brown: So last week was the second Yom HaShoah we’ve ever experienced in Israel, where it’s pretty low key. There’s the moment of silence, and things are shut down for the night of and through midday in Israel. Tomorrow will be our first Yom HaZikaron, and Thursday will be our first Yom HaAtzmaut, where we are in Ra’anana. Flags are flying everywhere: every building, every car, every street pole. There’s a big memorial service set up for tonight in Raanana that we will go to. It’s within walking distance from the apartment that we have. On Yom HaAtzmaut, if you do group things, we’ll be going to our friends, Canadians who live in Modiin for a barbecue, which is a very typical thing.
Ellin Bessner: Is Ben going to go with you to the ceremony or no?
Jeffrey Brown: I’m not sure if Ben’s going to go tonight because they’re closing the streets and it’s going to be very, very crowded. And it might be a little much. But tomorrow he’s got a full day of celebrating on Yom HaAtzmaut. He’s going to go with Zachary all day, starting with a breakfast, and he’s then going to go to Tel Aviv to a Yeshiva for a barbecue with a bunch of friends, and he’ll have a pretty full celebratory day as well.
People might be asking, how can the country celebrate with those hostages still where they are throughout the war? The resilience of the Israeli people is something I’ve experienced; I had never experienced before. Life goes on here. Are they happy? No. They want the war to be over once and for all. They want the hostages home once and for all. They want everything to be finished. But these things take time. And life goes on. People are working, people are exercising, people are going places. People go to school. People go out for pizza. People go out for dinner. Life goes on in Israel, even though it is very much still a country at war and a country experiencing horrible, horrible trauma.
Ellin Bessner: And I know there’s been some talk, a lot of talk even in the last two days, of Haredis who are protesting the recruitment to have more religious Jews be drafted. Your children went through the yeshiva system. They’re not the same, but I’m wondering how this impacts you when you see this, when your children put their lives on the line for Israel, and they are not.
Jeffrey Brown: It’s David Ben-Gurion’s biggest mistake in the Declaration of Independence, in the lack of a constitution to this day, to get the declaration through. They made this cover for the 10,000 Haredim that lived in the land, and he said, “Oh, they’ll see us rebuilding the land, toiling the soil. They’ll love it. They’ll want to become a part of it.” I think maybe he used Rav Kook as an example of a Haredi guy who was also a Zionist, and it hasn’t turned out quite that way with a burgeoning Haredi population that is quite insular. Certainly, they are very powerful political establishments, and they get their funding to support their lifestyles and other people, whether they’re religious like us or not. By the way, I think it’s a religious mitzvah to live in the land as a Jew; it’s a beautiful thing. So for the Haredim, yeah, there’s a benefit for all of us when people learn Torah, people daven, and do things like that. And sure, there’s plenty that does for Benjamin. But overall, it’s a frustration for many Israelis because it’s very expensive. They’re in a system that frankly doesn’t produce graduates, shall we say, that are integrable into society or particularly come with skills that could be of assistance in the military. It will evolve over time, and it has to be forced to some degree, in my opinion. But they will see, shoot, I can leave my little community. I can join the military and be with other people similar to me and not be exposed to coed units and things like that, and continue on my level of kashrut, continue my davening, continue to do everything that I do. But now I’m serving the state that is supporting me, my family, and the things that are important to me that will evolve over time. Otherwise, it’s not sustainable. There will be a backlash. And Ellin, the alternative I joke about is make them a part of a peace deal if there ever were to be a peace deal. “Okay, you’re not Zionist. You don’t believe in the Zionist state. Okay, become a part of the Palestinian state.” You know that’ll never happen.
Ellin Bessner: Well, no, but I’m asking is there might be some resentment in your family. It’s like your boys who are religious went and did this and now you’re, you know, in the hospital putting the pieces back together. And they’re not. They’re protesting. And I just… On Yom HaZikaron, and I just wonder how that sits with you. Like, is there any anger about it?
Jeffrey Brown: No, there’s no anger. They are fellow Jews. They are living in the land of Israel. We deal with them. Some of them are here in rehab. You see the families, you know, they’re here for different reasons, military; then can you hurt in the army? But now there’s plenty of people that are angry about it as a society. And I think that’s fair. Me? No, I’m focused on my son and have gratitude for the people that help him get back to where he was before.
I will tell you what does burn my butt is the Neturei Karta in North America and the ill-advised perception they cause non-Jews to get. Well, these guys are rabbis. I think that’s a very harmful thing, more harmful than what’s going on here in Israel. And Neturei Karta is a problem. But in terms of Israeli society, we still will have to fix itself. Things will evolve.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned. Just to end off, you mentioned a minute ago. A lot of people back home are praying for Benji. I personally did all summer, every single day, and I wondered what is still going on in terms of back here in Canada and your support back in your community.
Jeffrey Brown: It’s continuing strong both at my synagogue. They say a prayer for Benjamin every single davening, every single Shabbat at his school, at B’nay Akiva schools. I’m sure it happens at other schools as well. There’s quite a few groups where people say psalms for Benjamin that have been going strong, and there are two or three on WhatsApp that are still going strong. Here in Raanana, there’s a whole community that has adopted us and Benjamin to make sure we’re included in their prayers and we have everything that we need for our physical and spiritual well-being.
Ellin Bessner: What financial needs do you have that Canadians can help with or people, or is it all covered already by everything by what you mentioned earlier?
Jeffrey Brown: Benjamin’s being looked after by lots of different sources, including the government and a bunch of Israeli charities, and things like that. The most important thing is for people to continue to daven and do good things and stand up for Israel at every opportunity that they can. Particularly, I see the Bathurst and Sheppard group, the Walk for Israel. These are all the most important things. I just look back on what caused Benjamin to want to join the army. He went to Auschwitz and saw. And we’ll see what’s going on today in North America and elsewhere. The whole concept of a strongman is a little bit scary. We only have ourselves to take care of. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn’t have to look too far back in history or listen to some of the commentary of political leaders, not just in Canada, but in the United States as well.
Ellin Bessner: Do you still have this #BenjiStrong? Is that what you still do?
Jeffrey Brown: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He does his gesture. It’s all over the place. There’s this thing he does, if you can see it, he does this. And his new gesture is this. It does A-Okay. And it’s not just about #BenjiStrong. It is about #BenjiStrong, but it’s also about #IsraelStrong. We’ve learned that in rehab. It’s also about #GolaniStrong, which is. Benjamin is a Golanchik. That goes a long way here. It goes a real long way. And yeah, we get strength through everything. So #BenjiStrong is going strong, and it’s working.
Ellin Bessner: Well, thank you so much for helping us to get an update. We send you all our best, and we’ll be thinking of you on this solemn and then happier times.
And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Before he was wounded, Ben had only one month left in his compulsory military service- he had already decided to stay in Israel and work as a counsellor at a program for religious young Jews like himself that combines Torah learning with internships in the high-tech field.
At least 10 Canadians were killed on or after Oct 7: Ben Mizrachi, Netta Epstein, Shir Georgy, Tiferet Lapidot, Vivian Silver, Adi Vital-Kaploun, Alexandre Look, and Judith Weinstein Haggai, whose body is still in Hamas hands. Two IDF soldiers with Canadian roots were killed. Yonadav Levenstein and Ori Borenstein.
Show Notes
Related links
- Read more about Ben Brown’s injury after Oct. 7, in The CJN.
- Hear how the Jewish community in Toronto came together to support Ben Brown’s family through prayer, on The CJN Daily.
- Why those Canadians who served in the IDF and were on a new list published by an anti-Israel paper are fighting mad, in The CJN.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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