Eden Yerushalmi, 24: Budding pilates instructor who loved fashion

Eden Yerushalmi, 24, from Tel Aviv, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Supernova music festival on October 7 and murdered in captivity almost a year later.

Eden attended the festival, where she was working as a bartender, with a group of friends. They fled the scene of the rave when the Hamas attack began, but the terrorists opened fire on their vehicle, murdering her friends Dorin Atias and Lior Maimon.

Eden hid first among their bodies and later in the forest for hours, while on the phone with her sisters, waiting to be rescued. But eventually the sisters heard gunshots on the line and Eden cried out, “They caught me!” before the phone went dead.

She had also called the police, begging them to send help, with one sentence from the recording released by her family reverberating in Israel: “Find me, okay?”

After 11 months of being held in harsh conditions and starved of food, light and air, Eden was murdered by her captors on August 29, 2024, alongside Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino. Their bodies were retrieved by the IDF two days later from a tunnel in south Gaza.

She was buried in Tel Aviv on September 1, 2024. She is survived by her parents, Shirit and Naor, and her two sisters, Shani and May.

Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Eden was the middle child between her two sisters, according to a state eulogy. They gave her the nickname “Opossum,” an old family joke.

Her family said she had a wide range of interests: She loved pilates, and had just become certified as an instructor, loved animals of all kinds, enjoyed fashion, including sewing and playing matkot (paddle ball) at the beach, and loved riding her motorcycle around Tel Aviv.

She was working as a waitress at the Fifty&One restaurant in Tel Aviv and was hoping to soon start teaching pilates. Eden loved to travel, and already had plans to visit Greece not long after the Nova festival.

“Our sister Eden was a happy person, and she lived life to the fullest, and she loved life, and she was a great sister, she was an amazing sister, an amazing friend, she had a lot of friends, and now she’s our angel,” her sister May told CNN.

Her mother, Shirit, told the Maariv newspaper that “in addition to being my daughter, she really was a close friend, to me and to her sisters. She would call me every morning, even when I was at work, my coworkers would poke fun at me that she called me every day, but we’d always talk and have very deep conversations.”

Shirit said Eden was “a very energetic girl, very happy, not worried by things, she didn’t hold grudges, she didn’t fight with people. That’s why she was always surrounded by so many friends.”

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