Lior Maimon, 22: Bartender at rave had ‘a heart of gold’

Lior Maimon, 22, from Ramat Gan, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

She was slated to start working at the festival at 7 a.m., and arrived earlier to dance with her friends before her bartending shift began. At 7:20 a.m., she told her parents that she was leaving due to the rocket fire and asked them to pick her up from Tel Aviv. They never heard from her again.

“We were sure that she was on her way home, we were so sure,” her mother, Dganit, told Channel 13 news. “At 10 a.m. when she wasn’t reachable, and we saw the news on TV, we started to worry.”

After a week, her body was found and she was buried on October 15 in Tel Aviv. She was shot dead alongside her friend, Dorin Atias, while a third friend with them was kidnapped to Gaza.

She is survived by her parents, Dganit and Yariv, and her younger siblings Agam and Yaheli.

Her cousin, Shahar Maimon, told Channel 13 news that she was also at the Supernova rave that day, and didn’t know Lior was there until she passed by her as everyone was running from rocket fire.

“I called out to her, and she was on the phone to [her mother] at the time, and as soon as she saw me the first thing she wanted to do was to call my mother and tell her that I was OK,” recounted Shahar. “I gave her one final hug.”

“She was a wonderful person, she had so many friends, and she was murdered at such a young age, but if there’s something you can say about Lior, it’s that she lived her life as you should,” said Shahar. “She loved to have fun, to go out, she loved people. She was an angel — and now she’s really an angel.”

The singer David Carmel, whose mother was close friends with Lior’s mother, released a song, titled “And Maybe,” dedicated to Maimon, featuring video footage of her as a child and young woman, and lyrics including: “There aren’t enough words in the world/ To fill the hole that you left behind here/ There aren’t enough prayers in the world/ To drown out the pain of longing.”

Her mother, Dganit, wrote on Facebook, that her daughter was “a girl with a heart of gold full of endless generosity. Beautiful on the inside and the outside. They say that God takes the best, and now I know that it’s true — there is no doubt.

“Liori, we are asking forgiveness from you, for all the times we bothered you, we made comments, we worried too much — it was all for you,” she added. “And despite it all, we didn’t succeed in saving you and protecting you.”

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