Her life story

 About Talia

Talia was born in Haifa, Israel in 1983.

She was an out-going and loving girl. From early childhood she had always been sociable, collecting numerous friends.  Ironically, she lost her life when an army ambulance skidded into her car when she was on the way to college in Ariel, with a friend as passenger, after a visit to Jerusalem. Many saw her as a cheerful, confident person, who enjoyed organizing events. She had an inner-drive that swept others along with her enthusiasm.  However her family and closest friends knew that life had not always been as easy for her as it appeared.

The reason was that Talia suffered from both specific learning difficulties and psoriatic arthritis. She fought to overcome the problems associated with them and was succeeding due to her determination, as well as financial assistance from her family. At the time of her death, Talia was completing a pre-academic college programme and was hoping to be accepted to study for a first degree in social work.

During her early childhood, she had been found to have dyslexia and attention deficiency. Her frustration with her learning difficulties peaked when she began secondary school. At the age of twelve, she showed the first symptoms of psoriasis, a skin condition often triggered by stress, probably caused in her case by the difficulties she was having at school.

Like her friends, Talia wanted to study for her matriculation exams. However there was no suitable high school catering to her specific educational needs in her home-town, so for two and a half years she had to make a daily three-hour round trip from Haifa to Bayit-shel-Tamar school at Kibbutz Shfayim. There she learnt not only the subjects themselves but also how to concentrate as required during examinations, so being able to achieve her potential.

Like her peers, Talia joined the Israeli Defence Forces after leaving school- though she was discharged early because she was diagnosed as having psoriatic arthritis, a condition that occurs in nearly a quarter of cases of psoriasis. She then studied for a year at a religious seminary in the Golan Heights, enjoying making new friends and planning her life.

 Over the years she met many soldiers and other youngsters who, like her, suffered from psoriatic arthritis. This motivated her to be more pro-active and to help people like these both in her day-to-day life and choice of future career.

In her determination to gain more profile and medicines for psoriatic arthritis sufferers, Talia represented the younger members of the Israel Psoriatic Society at a meeting of the Labour and Welfare Committee in the Knesset early in 2005. In a letter to the committee following the meeting she described the effect on a teenager’s self-esteem of this disease, which affects old and young alike, depriving them of quality of life.

“ I remember as a child being jealous of healthy girls who didn’t have to wear their hair loose in order to hide the psoriatic rash on their necks, of the girls who could wear short-sleeved shirts, short skirts or shorts without caring about the social implications of shedding skin.

“As a teenager, on one occasion I was being hospitalized in the skin department for treatment,covered with horrible-smelling ointments and bandaged. Suddenly several friends decided to visit me as a birthday surprise. Instead of cheering me, their visit just caused me intense embarrassment…So often I missed out on going out with friends rather than wearing bandages in mid-summer… Later I began to be treated at the Dead Sea. To spend up to a month there a year is not fun, like my friends think. You have to lie in the sun - day in, day out- for hours on end, turning every few minutes like meat roasting on a spit, sometimes ending up with painful burns and in a state of collapse. Imagine what it is like to go through that, to think on the way back home that it was all worthwhile but to find shortly afterwards that both the skin rash and the pains in your joints have begun to return…

“Last year when I was studying in the Golan, the other girls would hike all over the area… and I couldn’t walk at all…I felt like an old woman inside the body of a young one…

I want to be able to tour the world walking without pain… to no longer worry how my skin looks when I choose what to wear, to write page upon page without feeling pains in my hands, to lift up my nephews easily, to stop dropping dishes.”

Talia hoped that her fellow sufferers would benefit from new medications, like those which she had just started to receive at the time of the Knesset meeting. These drugs are available but rarely prescribed under the health basket of approved medicines because of their high cost. For months prior to her first dose of Remicade, late in 2004, Talia had not been able to hold a pen correctly. The drug’s impact was dramatic. Within five hours of receiving that first infusion, she could write without pain. 

Talia’s mobility continued to improve remarkably in the two months after the Knesset meeting- thanks first to Remicade and later to Embrel, another new drug- and she began to feel optimistic about her future plans for study and marriage.

One positive result of Talia’s frustration with the traditional educational system was her great determination to fight for hers and others’ rights. It is therefore the aim of this Trust is to make up a little for her loss by helping children with similar problems, but who cannot find the finances for the extra tuition or medical treatment necessary to succeed.

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