A match made in wartime

(JNS) - RISHON LEZION, Israel - When the young American social media consultant volunteering in Israel saw a handsome IDF soldier recuperating in the hospital rehabilitation ward, she offered him a Fruit Roll-Up.

Miami-born Danielle Yablonka, 23, was tired of standing and listening to the older women on her solidarity mission talking, and, eyeing a soldier sitting nearby, was sure he would welcome the snack.

"Israelis are supposed to like everything American," she told JNS.

But Daniel Kopylov, 21, politely declined.

Undeterred, she then asked him if she could sit down. "Of course," the soldier replied.

"What happened to you," she asked matter-of-factly, unaware of his injury. "Can I record your story?" she added, taking out her phone and microphone.

Kopylov recounted how he had moved to Israel from Ukraine via Russia as a teen, going on to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. After describing his experiences fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he pulled the blanket off his lap, revealing his missing leg, and began doing pistol squats and push-ups.

"It was just so cute," said Yablonka. "I thought he was flirting with me."

"It was actually more for me," said Kopylov, he pecked her on the arm. "I felt I was disabled at the moment and wanted to show what I was capable of."

A new beginning

Six months later, the couple, who share a brimming positivity despite his injury and close call with death, are virtually inseparable.

Days after their chance encounter in April, Yablonka called Kopylov and asked him if he was able to leave the hospital for a drink over the weekend. He caught a taxi to Tel Aviv to meet her straight from the hospital, and the two ended up watching a movie at her relative's flat. 

A few days later, Yablonka's program in Israel ended and she returned to Florida ("she left me," Kopylov said.) But soon enough, Yablonka paid for her own trip back to Israel, and the couple spent every day of the two-week visit together (in between his physiotherapy treatments).

"He was a light in the middle of the war," said Yablonka. "To see a 20-year-old kid who had lost his leg and still smiling-for me it was a huge breath of fresh air in such a crazy time."

The next month, Kopylov, now fitted with a prosthetic leg, visited Yablonka in Florida, his first trip to the United States, where he also connected with her family. Soon thereafter, she was back in Israel with him-this time for good, realizing a years-long dream.

Different worlds connect

Yablonka, whose father is Israeli and mother is American, had always been connected to Israel but from afar, and had dabbled in painting and fashion modeling during college. But after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, she "just wanted to be in Israel."

Her encounter with anti-Zionism on American campuses, which burst into the open over the past year, actually preceded the massacre, she noted. She had spent her freshman year at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, where she was lectured by a "Jewish liberal professor" about how "Israel was in fact occupied Palestine." After graduating from Florida Atlantic University, she started working with the Hillel as a digital consultant promoting Israeli activists.

She had toyed with the idea of moving to Israel, but it was after the Oct. 7 attack that she made up her mind.

Some 6,500 miles away, Kopylov had been living in Israel over the last five years since immigrating with his mother and two siblings from Russia. "It was my older sister who was the Zionist," he offered shyly. Within a year, he had learned Hebrew at the youth village in the coastal city of Netanya and was determined to enlist in the IDF. 

"In Ukraine and Russia everyone is for themselves, and here we were more united and for each other," he told JNS.

When he turned 18, he enlisted in an infantry unit and was originally posted on the border with Lebanon when the war broke out. (Hezbollah launched mortars at his post on Oct. 8, 2023, in what he called he called "the scariest moment of his life" up until that point.) 

It was early March when his unit entered a booby-trapped house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Three soldiers were killed and 15 others injured, including Kopylov, when a remote-controlled bomb went off as they entered the building. He can remember applying a tourniquet to his leg before being airlifted to hospital, where he was in an induced coma for 48 hours. Besides losing his leg, doctors removed shrapnel from his stomach and intestine.

Her eyes welling with tears, his mother Nataliya recounts getting a phone call from the IDF.

She remained at his bedside along with her other family members as he recuperated.

Defying the odds, in less than a month he had already ventured out of the hospital on crutches to attend the graduation ceremony of his comrades from the very military course he had been in prior to the war. He got a standing ovation from the crowd, and gave the same pistol-squats performance he would repeat for his U.S. visitor several days later.  

In the meantime, Yablonka, determined to get back to Israel any way she could, connected with the Jewish Federations of Florida to join a five-day delegation of American Friends of Sheba. The fateful trip would be her third since Oct. 7.  

"In my eyes, he was wooing me," she said of their first encounter. "In his eyes he was showing me his cool moves," she added.

For the six months after their meeting, Yablonka worked on her previously nonexistent Hebrew, while Kopylov's English skyrocketed.

She is now on an educational program with Masa Israel Journey, an organization that works toward immersing Diaspora Jews into Israeli society and is teaching English at an Israeli elementary school.

Staying positive

In the meantime, Kopylov has completed five months of rehab. Shrapnel scars are still visible on his arm and face. Much to the chagrin of passers-by, he insists on carrying their groceries when the couple are together.

He is working out and thinking of competing in the paralympics, as well as trying to settle on a course of study (he hasn't ruled out physiotherapy.)

In December, he is scheduled to speak at the annual U.S. Mayors Summit in Beverly Hills hosted by the Combat Anti-Semitism Organization, after which he is to address a non-profit gathering in New York, dubbed 1000 Strong, that works in philanthropy for Israel.

Despite his ordeal, his outlook is only positive.

"I don't hold grudges. It won't bring my friends back, and it won't bring my leg back," he said.

The couple say that their chance encounter was fate.

"I never believed in fate before," Yablonka conceded. "Some things just happen that are not in our control," Kopylov offered.

"Look," he says, with his eternal smile. "If I hadn't lost my leg I wouldn't have met her," gesturing to Yablonka, who returns his wide smile. "Good things come out of bad."