Relationship between Michel Sommo and Yifat

The relationship between Michel Sommo and Yifat is defined by practical, affectionate fatherhood: care expressed in meals, stories, play, and close attention to her needs. Their ordinary family rituals give that bond a vivid shape, while Michel’s later demand that Yifat be returned to him shows how separation turns their intimacy into a custody conflict.

Family life and everyday intimacy

Yifat belongs to the domestic world Michel builds with Ilana and Boaz. When Boaz visits the family in Jerusalem, Michel helps make the gathering an occasion for renewed closeness: after the Sabbath he prepares a meal, and the adults arrange an evening out while a neighbor’s son looks after Yifat. In another small household scene, she tries to put Michel’s slippers on Boaz’s feet, treating the two men as participants in a shared family life.

The account of Yifat’s illness makes Michel’s care for her especially concrete. On the day Ilana goes to Haifa, Michel notices that Yifat has a fever and cancels a meeting with the deputy minister of defense that he had waited almost two months to secure. He takes her to a clinic, waits for the examination, obtains medicine, and stays home to tend her. When her temperature rises, he calls a private doctor; through the day he encourages her to drink, prepares food, tells stories, and sings to her. He remains beside her after she falls asleep, then sleeps fully dressed on a mattress at the foot of her bed in case she needs him.

That devotion does not prevent friction between Michel and Ilana. When she returns, she reacts irritably rather than with gratitude, questioning his decision to cancel the meeting and suspecting that his care might be intended to make her feel guilty for leaving. The episode therefore reveals both the depth of his attention to Yifat and the strain within the marriage through which that attention is interpreted.

Shared rituals and remembered closeness

In her later writing, Ilana recalls Michel and Yifat’s Saturday mornings as a sequence of familiar, shared acts. Michel brings orange juice and strained cocoa to bed; in the bathroom, he and Yifat play at shaving and race while brushing their teeth, as Ilana makes breakfast. Their Sabbath walks, family prayers, stories, games, and afternoon rest make Yifat part of a close domestic trio rather than simply the recipient of Michel’s care.

The remembered play is particular to their household. The family builds a Temple from toy bricks, using dominoes and colored buttons to represent its chambers and attendants; Michel tells stories and performs comic imitations that make Ilana and Yifat laugh. When Yifat once colors a map with Ilana’s lipstick, Michel responds by sending her to the balcony to think about what she has done. But when the sudden silence makes him fear that she has stopped crying, he rushes out, gathers her close, and shelters her inside his sweater. The recollection holds discipline and tenderness together: his sternness can give way quickly to concern for her distress.

Separation and the claim to custody

The later rupture between Michel and Ilana separates Yifat from the daily routines that had bound the family together. Ilana writes from the house where she is staying with Alexander Gideon and imagines Michel caring for Yifat without her: keeping her warm, feeding her, bathing her, combing her hair, and singing to her. These domestic details make the separation legible as a loss of shared time, not merely a change in living arrangements.

Michel’s own letter makes the conflict more explicit. He gives Ilana a deadline for Yifat’s return and says that friends will come to fetch the child, whether she is returned peacefully or by other means. He argues that Ilana has no rights or claims over Yifat under religious or state law, and distinguishes his demand for his daughter from the unresolved status of his relationship with Ilana. The letter turns Michel’s attachment into a forceful custody claim, showing how the couple’s private separation has become a dispute over who may care for Yifat and decide where she lives.

Provision, care, and absence

Material security also enters the story of Michel’s responsibility for Yifat. In a letter seeking financial help, Michel and Ilana request money for their children’s future as part of a larger account of the family’s needs. Alexander Gideon later says that his revised will will provide for Boaz and Michel’s family, and notes Yifat’s gentle, inventive approach to him: she brings him a homemade remedy and a dead grasshopper, asking for paper boats in exchange. These episodes place Yifat within the wider network of adults trying to secure her future, though they do not displace Michel’s direct, daily role as her father.

After Yifat is taken from the household where Ilana is staying, the remembered rituals become a measure of what Michel and Yifat have lost. Ilana imagines him managing the child’s routines and recalls the three of them together, but cannot know what their life apart has become. The relationship is therefore represented through two contrasting forms of evidence: Michel’s sustained, ordinary care for Yifat, and the painful absence that follows the adults’ conflict.