Those We Have Lost

Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, 21: Pirate-loving partygoer ‘a ball of light’

Murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7

Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa wears the chain that police later handed his mother, after it had been recovered in Re'im, stained with its late owner's blood. (Facebook)
Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa wears the chain that police later handed his mother, after it had been recovered in Re'im, stained with its late owner's blood. (Facebook)

Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, 21, of Kibbutz Samar, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

His mother said the last anyone heard of him was when he called his friend that morning and told him he was wounded and that “something bad is happening.”

Keshet attended the rave with many friends, including Shani Louk, who was murdered, and her boyfriend Orion Hernandez, who was taken captive to Gaza and remains a hostage. His mother said she later found out that fellow partygoer Motti Zoherman, 73, tried to help Keshet escape, and they were slain together in his car.

Keshet was missing for four days until his body was located and he was declared dead. He was buried on October 12 in Kibbutz Samar. He is survived by his parents, Natalia and Laurent, and his two sisters, Anan and Shemesh.

His last public Facebook post, on September 29, was inviting people to join him at Supernova. Festival co-organizers and twins Michael and Osher Vaknin, who were also murdered on October 7, were among those who commented on the post.

Family and friends said he was a ball of energy and a party animal, with long blonde curls and a curious spirit, who loved pirates, and whose favorite food was pasta bolognese. Though he grew up secular, his family and friends said in recent years he had begun to explore religion, even attending a synagogue in Tel Aviv on Simhat Torah, the night before he went to the Supernova rave.

His close friend, Kedem Linkhati, said she met Keshet four years ago, and that he “was the person I loved most in the world. The love of my life, I could say,” she said. “I see Keshet as a sort of ball of light, jumping, bouncing, talking nonsense, making people happy — he was really a point of light in my life.”

In his memory, she said, she started the “Nova Angels” website, encouraging people to do good deeds in the name of one of the people murdered at the festival, while she also fundraises to write a Torah scroll in his name — noting that the dissonance between the religious act and the irreligious party “just connects me again to Keshet, things that come from the heart.”

His mother, Natalia, told La’isha magazine that Keshet “had a huge smile and an enormous heart from a young age. If I would give him a square of chocolate, he would insist on giving me half — he was always happy helping others… Recently I understood that this approach only got stronger as he grew up.”

Natalia said Keshet’s friends “told me that he would buy a bottle of whiskey for hundreds of shekels and give out shots to strangers. He would say, ‘Why enjoy alone if you can enjoy together?’ He was also a super energetic kid — at age 5 he started doing cartwheels and would walk on his hands from home to the cafeteria — the whole kibbutz said he needed to go to the circus.”

Keshet didn’t fit in well in traditional frameworks, she said, noting his struggles in school and his decision not to enlist in the IDF, instead traveling the world and working in gardening and construction. After his death, she found a notebook in his room in which he had written prescient thoughts.

“The day that I begin my journey in the world to come, I will be ready for it. I won’t jump toward it but I will be ready. And be happy for me that I am in a different place,” he wrote. “It will surely be confusing at first, but imagine that I flew to the island of my dreams and I won’t want to come back forever.”

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