Dorin Atias, 23: ‘Tough on the outside, but inside she was all feeling’
Murdered at the Supernova music festival, October 7
Dorin “Dora” Atias, 23, from Ganei Tikva, was murdered by Hamas terrorists after fleeing the Supernova music festival on October 7.
She was slated to begin a bartending shift at the rave at 7 a.m., but arrived early to enjoy and dance with her friends before she started working. When rocket sirens started sounding, she fled in her car seeking safety, but was shot dead alongside her friend Lior Maimon, while a third friend was taken captive and is still held in Gaza.
Her body was discovered on October 11 and she was buried on October 12 in Savyon. She is survived by her parents, Tali and Meir, and her brother Niv.
Dorin was slated to receive her certification as a pilates instructor on October 8, her family said, and had already gone looking for studio space. She served in the IDF as an observation soldier in the Border Defense Corps along the Gaza border, and after she was released and saved up money she spent eight months traveling in South America, returning about a year before she was killed.
“She had a lot of dreams,” her mother, Tali Hadad Atias, told the Davar news outlet. “To open a pilates studio, to travel around the world, to be in the ocean, to play footvolley, to live life to the end.”
She said her daughter was “a perfect child… a girl of light and love with a huge heart. She couldn’t walk past a homeless person without giving him something. She was a child of the outdoors, a scout instructor, a talented footvolley player who loved the sea. Every Friday she would spend the entire day from morning to night at the beach — but she would still show up to Friday night dinner with flowers.”
Tali said Dorin moved to Tel Aviv and worked as a bartender, “and as far as she was concerned she was living the dream. Living near the sea, working in a bar, wandering around the city, she knew everyone. She was happy. I would walk around with her and it felt like I was going around with the prime minister. She had so many friends.”
Her friend Inbar Saban told the Guardian that Atias “was like my little sister that I chose myself at the age of 12,” adding that she was beloved by her family and friends and her death had “emptied so many hearts.”
Her friends set up a fundraising campaign in her name to help those in need: “We have to show humans chose peace and love, we must be the power of light in times of darkness. It keeps people together. This is the legacy of Dorin, all the light she brought to so many people,” said Saban.
Her friend Dor Krimhant wrote on Instagram that he had “so many things to say about Dorini — the way she eats from the side of her mouth or how she walks in any space like she owned it, or how she answers the phone in a unique way to everyone, or the way she drives with her leg up, or how she sleeps curled up like a little fetus — but what will it help? Nobody can know her, nobody can be privileged to meet Doron Atias. No words will succeed in describing Dorin.”
“Dorin is a color that doesn’t exist on the color spectrum, she is a human who is like no other, she is tough on the outside but inside she is all feeling, she has the biggest heart I’ve ever met and she taught me what it was to love unconditionally,” he wrote.
