Dafi Shoshana Alpern says portraying a mother trapped with her children during the October 7 attack left her physically and emotionally overwhelmed; away from acting, she also helps run a pharmacy that sells medical cannabisDina Halutz|While the internet was abuzz over the final two episodes of the fifth season of “Fauda," one of the show’s stars, actress Dafi Shoshana-Alpern, was undergoing treatment with a shamanic healer to confront for the first time what she had gone through during filming. The two episodes, 7 and 8, which aired with a trigger warning, depict what happened to a mother and her two children in a Gaza border kibbutz on October 7, from the moment the first Color Red alert sounded to the bitter end for all three.The broadcast prompted many reactions: protests over the difficult images, but also appreciation for their historical importance. Following the uproar, the Yes broadcaster released both episodes for free viewing in Israel and around the world. GalleryDafi Shoshana Alpern sought therapy after filming the October 7 episodes of 'Fauda' (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)“After the filming, I had some kind of repression, as if it didn’t happen,” says Alpern. “Only after watching the episodes did I start having flashbacks from the situations I went through. I went to a shamanic healer who gave me holistic treatment through touch and guided imagery, and along the way, things also came up that were not necessarily connected to the filming.”Alpern began her journey on “Fauda” in the third season and appeared in the series for three seasons as Hagit Ben-Horin, the widow of Avihai (Boaz Konforty), the unit’s sniper. When Avihai is mistakenly killed by friendly fire during a complex operation, she finds comfort in the arms of Eli Aharon (Yaakov Daniel Zada), the team’s new commander, and the two become a couple. On October 7, when Eli is called to the unit at dawn “because something is happening,” she is left alone with her two children on the kibbutz. When the sirens begin, they barricade themselves in the safe room together with their Arab worker, and she reassures her children that it will be over soon, “because that’s how it always is.” But this time it is not like that. After hours of attempts by Nukhba terrorists to get them out of the safe room, the terrorists set the door on fire, force them to escape through the window, then capture them, rape her and finally kill them all. Alpern's character is held by a Nukhba terrorist on October 7 (Photo: Elia Spinopoulos, courtesy of Yes and +STING)“When Avi Issacharoff called to tell me what was going to happen to my character in the new season, I understood it was going to be something big, but I didn’t understand how big,” she recalls. “It was in August 2024, less than a year after the disaster, and I remember I couldn’t speak. He didn’t elaborate much, he just said these would be episodes the whole world would watch and that I would be their hero.”How did you feel at that moment?