After Bombing, Israeli Women Seek Solace

In an era in which televised media presents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a series of violent political confrontations, Orna Ben-Dor’s documentary “Once Widowed, Twice Bereaved” offers a more nuanced portrait of those most affected by the struggle.

The film explores the friendship that brings relief to five Israeli female survivors of March 2002’s suicide bombing of the Matzah restaurant in Haifa, Israel. Ben-Dor presented her film on April 6 to a Harvard audience and offered deeper insight in a subsequent question-and-answer session and personal interview.

Ben-Dor, a filmmaker best known for her award-winning documentary, “Because of That War,” depicts the suffering endured by these women whose tragedy-plagued lives leave them searching for a means of emotional recovery. They convene at a hotel to recount their experiences, as all of them lost family members in the bombing.

In these sessions, the women engage each other in a conversation only they can understand. Ben-Dor tells us in a voiceover as the film begins that since the attacks, the five women have become best friends and support each other continually.

Ben-Dor keeps the camera tightly focused on her subjects as they undergo healing therapy. The filmmaker’s keen attention to the powers of touch give the film a gentle sense of feminine consolation.

The women sit in a circle among white pillows and sheets, cathartically revisiting their memories of the attack. The film cuts between their anguished faces in sessions and footage taken at each woman’s home as she shows Ben-Dor the artifacts left by loved ones.

As the women place their hands on each other and hug themselves in a healing embrace, it is clear that they search for comfort from one another because other sources have failed them. Particularly cynical of the social and governmental support within Israel, the women are ambivalent to accept outsiders’ compassion.

The title “Once Widowed, Twice Bereaved” refers to their new standing in the eyes of the state. The women all face the painful task of changing their family status on Israeli social security forms. The inability of the form to account for the many family losses they have endured reflects a larger societal neglect and misunderstanding of their new status.

The film takes a clear political stance on the inadequate comfort and aid offered to the families of these victims. “Israel is a country that knows how to grieve for her military victims but not for her civilians,” Ben-Dor says, speaking in an interview last week.

Religious support similarly fails. The women find little solace in the Jewish religious framework meant to console them. This unending search for consolation is portrayed with pronounced clarity and empathy, as shown by one woman’s struggle with cancer after losing her daughter.

Lying in a hospital bed as she receives treatment toward the end of the film, she asks, “Why do I have to hallow His name for taking what was most precious to me?”

Their grief is more private than any political platform would depict. The women are surprisingly uninterested by the perpetrator or the political implications of the event. “What made me fall in love with them is that they’re not angry. They’re not Israeli in that way. They are accepting it,” Ben-Dor says. “They’re such noble women with such big hearts,” she adds.

Ben-Dor explains that she “had to make a film about this feminine family… I became a different mother after making the film. I can’t fight with [my kids] anymore. They just make me laugh.”

She felt personally invested in portraying the anxiety of the Israeli mother. The vulnerability of life in a tumultuous society hit close to home for Ben-Dor, whose own son recently finished his mandatory service in the Israeli army. “I’m a peacenik, a ’60s refugee and I couldn’t believe that my son would become a soldier and go to the front,” she says.

The film was made right after her son finished his military term, and Ben-Dor explains, “I think the universality of the pain [in the film] is losing things that you love. You can lose it in such a traumatic way, as they did and you can lose it in a less dramatic way. That’s why people can relate to each other when they are in such a deep depression.”

“Once Widowed” achieves an astonishing emotional proximity to the women’s grief. Ben-Dor claimed that the trusting relationship established early on between the filmmaker and her subjects arose from natural rapport. “When you really take interest in someone, he opens up. I was very passionately interested in their stories,” she says.

This personal approach to an international conflict reflects Ben-Dor’s confidence in the capacity for people to heal one another. As a society, Ben-Dor insists, “We just need time to change us all—Palestinians and Israelis. We treat our lives like they’re black and white but the truth is that life is so much more complicated, there is no good and bad, there aren’t winners and losers.”