Ground ‘saturated with the blood of our children’: Anger after holiday revelry at Nova site

Dozens of Israelis, including bereaved family members, held Simchat Torah holiday celebrations with dancing at the Nova massacre memorial near Kibbutz Re’im on Saturday, sparking angry confrontations with other grieving family members after the gathering went ahead despite official requests to refrain.

Videos from the site showed participants dancing in hakafot, the traditional Simchat Torah procession with Torah scrolls, just meters from the site’s anemone memorial installation.

The gathering prompted confrontations between relatives of people murdered at the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, in which 378 people were killed at the rave and 44 were taken hostage to Gaza, and highlighted the rifts among bereaved families over the best ways to commemorate their loved ones.

Eran Litman, whose daughter Oria Litman Ricardo was murdered at Nova, overturned a refreshments table during one confrontation.

Speaking to Radio 103FM on Sunday, Litman said there had been an agreement that the celebrants would remain in parking areas farther from the memorial site.

“I demanded that they stop,” he said. “I told them that my daughter danced her last dance there, and that the ground was saturated with the blood of our children, that even the German Nazis don’t dance at Auschwitz.”

Litman said the group ignored him and continued dancing, prompting him to overturn their table. He said some participants then tried to push him.

“The police came, someone from the JNF also came and promised that it wouldn’t happen, the police also promised that they would be removed, and I left,” he said.

Yoram Yehudai, whose son Ron was murdered at the festival, said he and his wife had gone to the site to tend to their son’s memorial and prepare for an upcoming ceremony, not to confront participants.

מתחם הנובה עכשיו pic.twitter.com/1FvOzV5jE9

— לירי בורק שביט (@lirishavit) October 3, 2026

“I really didn’t come to confront anyone. I trusted the police to enforce the arrangements,” Yehudai told Channel 12.

He said he later heard singing and cheering and found a large group dancing near the memorial. The Ynet news site quoted Yehudai as telling the participants that he felt “humiliated” by their actions.

“This place is our Auschwitz. Our Treblinka. You don’t celebrate there or at Yad Vashem,” he later told Ynet, adding that he did not regard the gathering as a prayer service. “What is happening here is a celebration.”

A similar Simchat Torah gathering was held at the site last year and drew anger from some bereaved families. This year, police and KKL-JNF, which runs the site,  had made clear in advance that they would not approve such celebrations.

KKL-JNF said ahead of the holiday that the Nova site would be open during this period only for remembrance and reflection, and that organized activities unrelated to commemoration would not be approved.

KKL-JNF chairman Eyal Ostrinsky told Ynet that holding celebrations at the site of a massacre was disrespectful “both to the place and to Judaism.”

The event dubbed “Simchat Torah in Re’im,” was organized by several right-wing groups representing some of the bereaved families of October 7 victims and fallen soldiers, including the Din VeTzedek Forum, the Tikva Forum, and Samot Gvul, according to the Hebrew news site Davar.

Kobi Samrano, whose son Yonatan was murdered at Nova and his body abducted to Gaza, was identified by Israel Hayom as one of the event’s organizers. “Where the music stopped, we continue with song, prayer and hakafot,” he said, quoted by the site.

The organizers claimed that the event had the support of bereaved families and urged the public to respect the different ways families choose to commemorate their loved ones, according to Hebrew media reports.

They also said participants included former hostages, wounded Israelis, soldiers, Gaza-border residents, and religious and secular Israelis, and urged the public not to “add pain to the existing pain,”  Ynet quoted the organizers as saying.

מתחם הנובה, עכשיו pic.twitter.com/bQ7Mf5LQl0

— ינון מגל Yinon Magal (@YinonMagal) October 3, 2026

Opposition to the gathering had been voiced in advance by several bereaved relatives.

Dasi Aviad, whose son Aviad Halevi was murdered at Nova, said that she wanted people to continue visiting the memorial, but said they should treat the site with extreme sensitivity.

“Every person who comes and stands in front of a picture or a sign warms the heart,” she told Ynet. “God willing, this place will be full of visitors for generations.”

But, she added, “the ground here is sacred, even if it has not been officially declared so, no less than a synagogue or other holy places.”

“At this place, you have to walk on tiptoe,” Aviad said, “and with every step think about where we are walking and what may have happened exactly beneath our shoes.”

She said people should still come to the site, including on the anniversary of the massacre, but should move through it “in sacred silence” that respects those who were murdered there.

The Nova site has become one of Israel’s most prominent October 7 memorials. In March 2025, it had been the country’s most visited site between the previous September and February, drawing an average of around 7,000 visitors a day. Bereaved families have erected individual memorials across the grounds, while KKL-JNF allocated NIS 4 million ($1 million) to improve the site with accessible pathways, restrooms, educational spaces, signage and a memorial grove.