My Friend’s Daughter, a GBM Survivor, Needs Help. Perhaps You Also Know Someone in Need.

My friend Eric’s daughter’s name is Shannon. She is 29 years old. A gifted architect, a former IDF commander specializing in optics, a woman of uncommon beauty and resolve. In February of 2023, the day after she presented her graduate thesis, she fainted during a university presentation. A CT scan revealed a mass in her brain. The diagnosis: glioblastoma multiforme — Stage 4. The prognosis: six to fourteen months.

Her father, Eric, is a scientist. A French émigré who moved to Israel on a scholarship to the Technion in Haifa. A rational man — precise, linear, fact-based. He is not the kind of person to whom miracles come easily. But he is exactly the kind of person you want in your corner when the system tells you there is nothing left to do. Because that is what the system told him. More than once.

When I first met Eric, he had the look of a man who wanted to be left alone. For two weeks, I kept my distance, telling myself I was respecting his space. The truth is, I was protecting myself from rejection. Eventually I sat down next to him, said hello, and asked what had brought him there. What he told me changed everything.

Eric was not a religious man. He had no interest in synagogue, in prayer, in any of it — until Shannon’s diagnosis turned his world inside out. A rabbi in the south of Israel told him he........

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