May Naim, 24: Partygoer who loved to help her famous grandfather cook

May Naim, 24, from the central moshav of Gan Haim, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

Naim was survived by her parents, Anat and Ofer, and siblings Shelly, Tal and Ran, and many other family members.

According to news reports, Naim fled from the party to the nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, and her body was found inside a shelter holding on to that of Lotan Abir, her childhood friend who grew up on the same moshav.

She was the granddaughter of Shlomo Scharf, a well-known Israeli soccer commentator and former coach and player.

“I never imagined in my life I would have to bury a granddaughter,” Scharf told Kan public TV on the sidelines of her funeral. “She was a girl who spread a huge light around her… on Fridays she would always help me cook. She was my right-hand woman. She would hug me and I would feel like her heart entered inside me.”

The singer Odeya released a single a month after her death called “White Angel,” dedicated to Naim. The song memorialized her as someone who loved to travel the world, dance, and cook with her grandfather: “We haven’t heard you laugh for awhile/ We haven’t seen you cry for awhile/ Because you wouldn’t cry/ Just dance.”

Her mother, Anat, told the La’Isha magazine that “May was a girl with a huge smile, that everyone loved,” recalling that she served in the military in the intelligence division of the elite Duvdevan unit. “She worked around the clock in order to provide the fighters with the best intelligence, she played a role in hundreds of operations… but when she was in crisis, attacked by terrorists, nobody saved her.”

A month after her death, her sister, Shelly, wrote on Instagram that the past 30 days “have felt like the longest eternity in the world.”

“I feel like a baby learning to walk, step by step, carefully without falling,” she wrote. “This is the new reality, to learn to live with the largest pain my body and soul have ever known. I miss you so much, I keep looking for signs and waiting for you to come visit me in a dream and give me a loud kiss and the strongest hug in the world so I can feel you even just for a second. Please come!”

Read more Those We Have Lost stories here.