IDF Officer's Daughter Weds: Emotional Peretz Family Ceremony

The Peretz family celebrated a wedding this week tinged with both profound joy and deep sorrow. Hallel Miriam Peretz, daughter of the late Major Eliraz Peretz who was killed in combat in the Gaza Strip in 2010, was married in a ceremony where she was escorted to the wedding canopy by her mother Shlomit and her grandmother, Israel Prize laureate Miriam Peretz.

In a deeply personal social media post, Miriam shared the complex emotions that accompanied this milestone celebration, shadowed by loss and absence. "Today my heart contracts from the intensity of the pain, and in exactly the same measure expands from the magnitude of the joy," she wrote. "Today, my beloved granddaughter Hallel Miriam enters the chuppah accompanied by her dear mother Shlomit and by me. This is not how it should have been. In my place, her father, my son Eliraz, should have been escorting her. But Eliraz will look down on her today from heaven. He will look at his beautiful daughter, who resembles him like two drops of water."

Miriam reflected on what her late son might be feeling as he watches his daughter's wedding from above. "I imagine him up there, and perhaps tears will fall from his eyes. Perhaps his heart, like mine, will contract with great pain that he did not merit to escort her on her day of joy, that she was orphaned when she was only five years old, when he went out to battle in Gaza from which he did not return. And perhaps his heart will also expand with joy when he sees a beautiful bride building a home and establishing a family in the Land of Israel."

She also touched on the continuity represented by her granddaughter's choice of partner. "Perhaps Eliraz is also smiling up there, laughing his familiar laugh and telling her: 'In the end you took a Golani officer... you stayed in the Golani family,'" Peretz wrote, referring to the elite infantry brigade in which Eliraz served. "When she was born, he named her Hallel Miriam, 'after you, Mom,' he told me then. And today, the girl who grew and blossomed in the shadow of her father's absence but always wrapped in his spirit, walks toward a new future."

Miriam Peretz concluded her message with hope and blessings for the young couple. "Today we will be moved, and there will be tears of longing, absence and great pain, but there will be more tears of joy. The joy of life and its strength, the joy of hope and continuity, the joy of rising from destruction and building a new life. My son Eliraz was a child of the joy of life, and that joy has triumphed today. May you merit to build a home full of light, love and joy. [Your] father blesses you from heaven, and we embrace you from here."