Looking to sway Spanish-speaking world, new series interviews Latin Israelis about Oct. 7

On camera, Natalia Casarotti recounts the tragedy of searching for her 21-year-old son, Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught on Israel.

Keshet had gone to the Supernova music festival, where 364 revelers were slaughtered by terrorists that day. His long blond hair made him a recognizable figure. Four days later, his mother learned that he was dead.

“How am I going to tell my parents?” Casarotti remembers asking herself. “For 24 hours, I told them the truth: I did not know where my son is.”

Casarotti gives this testimony in Spanish. She is a Latin American immigrant to Israel. Her voice, along with those of other Latin American immigrants to Israel directly impacted by October 7, appears in a new Spanish-language docuseries. Titled “Testigos del Terror,” or “Witnesses of Terror,” it was produced by Fuente Latina, a US-based nonprofit organization that does pro-Israel outreach to non-Jewish Spanish-speaking communities worldwide.

“Testigos del Terror” premiered with a screening in Los Angeles in February. Fuente Latina aims to further publicize the docuseries through film festivals, a streaming platform and/or a distributor.

“What we want ‘Testigos del Terror’ to do is get the message across, be able to resonate with [Spanish speakers] who will see it for what it is — not a political issue but a human issue, a human tragedy,” said Leah Soibel, a Hispanic-American Israeli who is the founder and CEO of Fuente Latina.

Immediately after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, Soibel noticed that the victims included Latin American immigrants to Israel. Some were among the 1,200 murdered, others among the 251 hostages taken into Gaza, and still others among the suffering family members or friends. These included the part-Argentine Bibas family, whose young redheaded children Ariel and Kfir and mother Shiri became international symbols of the hostage situation.

Fuente Latina decided to pivot from its previous approach to advocacy, which relied more upon soundbites. It incorporated a longer-form storytelling project to familiarize non-Jewish Latino audiences with the massacre. It would do this through interviews with individuals impacted by October 7, as well as footage that was reportedly recorded by Hamas terrorists themselves. All of it would be in Spanish, either spoken directly by interviewees or with subtitles. Filming started in December 2023, with the filmmakers conducting dozens of interviews.

“We could not select any to discard,” Soibel said. “Every single one of the voices was critical to the story.”

A blank slate

In a Zoom interview, Soibel detailed multiple reasons for embarking on such a project.

“Most Hispanics do not have a fully formed public opinion about Israel,” she said. “They don’t really know what happened on October 7. The specific motivation to create and produce the docuseries was to ensure we can tell the story, ensure it’s in a way [that resonates] culturally and linguistically with them.”

Soibel posited that “Hispanics have less antisemitic sentiments… than any racial group. They very much are potential allies in the fight against antisemitism, the fight against denialism of October 7. In the middle of the fight over US-Israel relations, we must connect with them, build relations with them. We hope the project, the docuseries, is able to be a tool in the process.”

The series currently consists of four episodes, with a fifth in the works. Episodes one and two were shared with The Times of Israel. The former focuses on kibbutzim near the Gaza border, while the latter addresses the Supernova festival.

Some interviewees lost family members that day, including at Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha. In episode one, Argentine Israeli Esther Mikanowski reflects on the death of her 80-year-old sister, Silvia Mirensky, and fellow Argentine Israeli Arie Glazberg shares the pain of losing his 43-year-old daughter Noa Glazberg.

“Every second, I miss her,” Arie Glazberg says. “So does my wife.”

Casarotti is interviewed in episode two. Casarotti was born in Argentina and moved to Israel at the age of 3, with her family. As she explains, she went to a police station to file a missing persons report in the search for her son. She also gave a DNA sample.

Many other interviewees in the docuseries are originally from Argentina, including residents of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha — which, like the Supernova festival, was attacked on October 7.

One such resident, Luis Roitman, recalls on camera how his life changed when he immigrated to Israel. He marvels at transitioning from working as a merchant in Argentina to washing vegetables in a kibbutz kitchen.

“It was the best place I could have wished for myself and my family,” he says.

On October 7, that dream became a nightmare.

Roitman woke up to a “very strong burning smell,” with many people “wandering around,” including one with a rocket-propelled grenade.

“I saw a terrorist walk in front of me, shooting toward my direction,” he says, adding that he fired back and hit the assailant “in the butt.”

Other interviewees hail from elsewhere in Latin America. They include Venezuelan Israeli Sharon Truzman, a survivor of the Supernova massacre.

At 6 a.m. on October 7, she and her friends re-entered the festival from their car. Half an hour later, they were in front of the main stage when they saw missiles in the morning sky.

“I didn’t understand how close we were to Gaza until they started firing,” Truzman tells the camera.

“Everyone started running,” she says later in the episode. “We ran at least two hours in total.” Although her hope grew “less and less and less,” she remembered thinking, “We’ve got to fight to the end, we’ll never give up.”

Filling a void

Soibel said that Israel has no Spanish-language news network and contended that misinformation is rife on Spanish-language online content about October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which wrecked much of the enclave’s infrastructure and, according to the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry, has claimed over 48,000 Palestinian lives.

“There’s a lot of factual content out there, but by and large, a lot of content is an endless arsenal of misinformation,” Soibel said.

That is why, in the first episode, survivor testimonies are interwoven with historical footage of Latin American immigrants coming to Israel in multiple waves, beginning in the second half of the 20th century. (Today, according to the docuseries, more than 10 out of every 1,000 Israelis are Latino.)

Soibel voiced a hope that by learning more about this historical narrative, non-Jewish Latinos across the globe will find a connection with Jewish Latinos in Israel, and empathize with what they endured on October 7.

“Any Hispanic immigrant — whether a migrant within Latin America, or those from Latin America coming over to the US, or anywhere else in the world — it’s a story they can all relate to,” Soibel said.

“Leaving political and economic hardship in your home, moving to a place you think there’s a better place for your family, and something very tragic happens. How do you find the strength to move on and start again?” she asked.

“Essentially, that’s the story we tell about a lesser-known community, the Latin American community in Israel.”