When they were born, Yael came first, and then came her twin sister, Avital, the twins preserved that sequence 31 years later when they both gave birth on the same day on Monday to boys at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
That’s not where the coincidences stopped, according to a hospital news release and an interview the twins gave to Kikar HaShabbat, a religious news outlet. The sisters Yael Yishai and Avital Segel, who live in the Gush Etzion bloc in the West Bank, were each bearing a fourth child, and each had two girls and a boy already.
The nursing staff made sure the sisters shared a room, which they appreciated. "The lovely nurses recognized the excitement and immediately asked for my sister's name to reserve us a shared room in the department," Avital said.
"After long hours in the delivery room, my son was born healthy, as the crew went above and beyond to ease the process. After the labor process, they made sure to move me to the room next to my sister, and it was so much fun to be in the same room, with our newborns," Avital shared.
Yael added: "Childbirth is a special and exciting event, and I'm glad to share it with a close friend who's also my sister. It was fun being in a room with the new babies. At the previous birth, we had a six-week delay between the births of our babies, and that would be our second maternity leave together."
Shaare Zedek noted that a similar event occurred in 1997.