Former POW Surgeon Serves in the IDF Alongside His Son

Father Nahum and son Koren are showing their bravery by serving together in Battalion 920 and accumulating 250 days of reserve duty.

By Shula Rosen

Forty years ago, Israeli surgeon Nahum Nesher was a prisoner of war in the notorious Al-Mezzeh prison in Damascus.

Despite his traumatic ordeal, he is now serving in the IDF again, this time alongside his son in Battalion 920 on the Syrian border, where they are accumulating 250 days of reserve duty.

There are many testaments to his courage, including rescuing his son from the Amazon rainforest.

Nahum Nesher, a professor at Ichilov Hospital and one of Israel’s leading thoracic surgeons, hauls a heavy medical pack within enemy territory.

Koren Nesher is a law and business student at Reichman University when he isn’t involved in reserve duty.

Both father and son emphasize the importance of serving their country.  “We’re not blind or stupid. We see what’s happening around us,” says Nahum. “If no one protects the border, we won’t have a country.”

In 1984, Nahum was serving in an intelligence role in the IDF when the enemy captured him. Held in Syria, he was interrogated and tortured.

“I got out by the skin of my teeth,” he recalls. “I carry it with me every day. I’m probably the only person ever to voluntarily return to the country where he was once taken prisoner.”

Nahum served as a reservist several times, believing that his last time was as a medical commander of the Home Front Command’s elite search-and-rescue unit in 2005.

However, when he was treating victims of the Hamas massacre in 2023, he received a phone call from his son and realized he would be serving again.

Koren told his father that despite an injury incurred in a car accident in South America, which may have exempted him, he would do reserve service as a paratrooper. That’s when his father decided he would also return to don the uniform.

“Like a true dad, he didn’t ask questions. He just said, ‘I’m coming with you,'” Koren recalls.

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