The wall in her heart

 
In memory of Yuval Heiman - 28th of Sivan 5753 (June 16, 1993) – 23rd of Tammuz 5774 (July 18th, 2014)

When Yuval Heiman finished officers course, he became the radioman of the battalion commander and in that role he was killed in Operation Protective Edge. 

Yuval Heiman was the son of Moshe and Zohara, the brother of Arbel, Ashchar and Aluma. He was born in the settlement of Efrat to a founding family – fourth generation on the settlement. Yuval’s friends recount that he excelled in everything – in school, sports, the squad commander course and officers course. On the other hand, he was a modest person and never talked about being gifted. 

Yuval attended the Doron Avot High School in Efrat; he was a counsellor in Bnei Akiva and invested a great deal of time and energy in the annual summer camp for disabled children that the chapter organized. In the army, he served in the Paratrooper Combat Engineers and was sent to officers course, where he served as a radioman to the battalion commander. 

On June 18th, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, the Gefen battalion in which Heiman served in Training Base 1 was sent to the northern Gaza Strip and was given responsibility for defending the zone. Three days later, he was riding with the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dolev Keidar, on the way to a location where there was a suspected penetration by terrorists. An anti-tank missile was fired at their vehicle and then another. Yuval got out of the vehicle with the battalion commander and the scout. The  three of them were killed in the encounter with the terrorists. The driver of  the vehicle was also killed.

Revaya Sharlot, girlfriend of Yuval Heiman z”l, describes their great love, which was cut off in the middle of life, and their secret place where they sat on the walls of Jerusalem. From there they looked out on the Old City and thought about the people who had lived there over the generations. And they dreamed about the home they would soon build together. 
 

Behind the scenes: 

Rotem Yarakchi and Reut Eldad: 

When we first read the  story of  Yuval Heiman, we felt like we had suffered an open wound. The beautiful love story between Yuval and Revaya, which was cut short, gave us the feeling that we are entering Revaya’s world of fresh and oppressive bereavement. The opportunity as artists to create the world that they imagined together was very emotional for us.
By means of Revaya’s story, we tried to weave a world of fantasy into the walls of Jerusalem, which they so loved. We tried to put ourselves in their place – to imagine what they dreamed there, where exactly they sat, what they looked at and what they saw. 
More than once during the clip we asked ourselves if during all of these walks on the Old City’s walls—a landscape that so many soldiers had been died for—whether the two imagined that Yuval would join the ranks of those who will forever walk there as part of the place’s bloodstained history. 

From the press,

Yuval Heiman -Animated memories - Beit Avi Chai collaborates with the families of fallen soldiers to create animated films in their memory - The Jerusalem Post April 21, 2015