Avi & Sam Rosenfeld, whose son, Sergeant Natan Rosenfeld, fell in battle in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday, reminisced in an interview with Arutz Sheva-Israel National News about their son's special character.
"He always had the biggest smile. He loved living life to the fullest. There was not a minute to waste," says Sam.
She describes how, from the moment he would return home on leave, Natan would go to meet friends. "Home was not for sleeping, it was for seeing his friends."
"He had a great group of friends. Loads of people that he loved to see, go out with, do silly things with, and just hang out with. That's what he loved to do. This was life to him; school wasn't for him, but this was his life."
His father adds that despite Natan always going out with friends, he made sure to spend quality time with his son. "I sometimes had to haggle with him. I would say, 'Let's go out for a burger or a beer,' and he would come, of course. It was my chance to sit and talk to him; he enjoyed it, and I loved it."
Avi reminisces about how, when Natan was younger, the two would ride motorcycles through Europe. "He would sit behind me. We used to go all over the place. I had very, very close contact with my son."
While they would try to convince him to eat at least one meal with them on Shabbat, Avi notes that he and Sam understood that Natan wanted to live life. "The obvious thing is when you go in (to Gaza), it gets dangerous, so we understood that."
Sam says that Avi was the one who did the worrying while their son was on the front lines: "I'm a practical person. I'm a teacher, so during the day, I didn't have a chance to think about it. At night, I needed to be able to sleep because I needed to be able to work the next day. My husband could worry for the world, his wife, and everyone, so he took the weight of the world on his shoulders, more than I did. I just dealt with the practical things."
She adds, "We were so proud that we didn't really worry. I didn't want to worry; I couldn't let that into my thoughts, it was too negative."
Despite the great loss, Avi insists that he has no second thoughts about making Aliyah 11 years ago. "I'm proud, I'm happy. There is no other place. My parents grew up in Eastern Europe, they went through the Holocaust. We've seen again and again what history has in mind for Am Yisrael. We've got a land now, which is our land. It's a family. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world. This is the place. It's a beautiful country, the people are good people, and thank G-d, we are very happy, although we had to pay a very heavy debt to be able to live in this country."
Sam describes her feelings ahead of her son's funeral, which was held shortly after the interview: "It's still not real for me. When the army came yesterday, and I was sitting there and my daughter kept asking, 'Are you sure it's him? Do you know it's him?' It was so unreal. What made it real was seeing him today, battered and bruised, and so cold. We know he's not there, we know it's just his body. But we're still so proud."
She added: "In the army, there's no division between haredi, hiloni (secular), and dati (religious), so there shouldn't be amongst our own people outside the army. This land is for everyone. This land is ours. Everyone needs to be able to agree to share, to sit, to talk. We always are going to have disagreements, but in the army, there's no division, and we should have no division either."