He can’t yet walk, but he has already been called up by the army for reserve duty – as a driver.
For Elihu Ben-Shoshan, crawling is more his speed these days, preferably with a pacifier firmly planted in his mouth.
Nevertheless, as Israel Defense Force order recently arrived in the mail at his Carmiel home, ordering him to show up for duty as a driver in a month.
“I burst out laughing, I couldn’t believe it,” his mother Michael Ben-Shoshan told the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot. “What, they’ve started drafting babies into the army?”
The IDF said in response that thousands of similar orders are issued weekly, and such a mistake in the paperwork is possible.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
