Soldier’s Wife Wages Own Battle

For Karnit Goldwasser, the hardest part is “to go to sleep alone and to wake up alone.”

Goldwasser went from student to international figure after her husband, Ehud, and another Israeli soldier, Eldad Regev, were captured by Hezbollah fighters July 12 while on patrol near the Lebanese border.

“On July 12, my life was over. I woke up as an ordinary person, but since that day I wake up with the same goal.... My own war is to bring my husband back home,” she said.

In the last week, Karnit Goldwasser has traveled across the United States with her husband’s father, Shlomo, to raise awareness and apply pressure for the release of her husband. They visited New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Washington before coming to Los Angeles, home to the country’s second-largest Jewish community.

Ehud Goldwasser, an environmental engineering student at Haifa’s Technion, was one day from fulfilling his annual monthlong military service when he was captured.

His wife of 10 months, also a student there, has put her studies on hold.

Karnit’s days are now spent thinking of her husband and imagining conversations with him.

“I know he is still alive,” she said.

She and her father-in-law appeared at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with Ehud Danoch, Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, and with the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, John Fishel.

Their brief visit to Los Angeles will be followed by a trip today to New York, where she and Shlomo Goldwasser will attend the U.N. Security Council debate on a resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.

Although the abductions of the soldiers sparked Israel’s assault in southern Lebanon, Shlomo Goldwasser said Israel’s action would have happened eventually anyway because of Hezbollah’s accumulation of rockets.

Karnit Goldwasser was flanked by photographs of her husband, Regev and Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas three weeks earlier near the Gaza Strip.

She said, “To me, the end of the war will be only when I can be with Udi in quiet, in peace.”