Moriya Raviv, 23: World-traveling free spirit was ‘iconic, brave’

Moriya Raviv, 23, from Kiryat Motzkin, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

She attended the rave with her friends Ziv Frenkel and Lin Dafni, both of whom were also slain that day.

Moriya went to the rave to celebrate her 23rd birthday, which fell on October 8. When the rocket fire began, she called her mother to say she was heading home as the festival was canceled, but that was the last her family heard from her.

She was buried outside Haifa on October 10. She is survived by her parents, Sima and Meir, and her younger siblings Roie and Shira.

Moriya grew up in the Haifa area, and in high school she was an active youth guide for school trips as well as a volunteer firefighter. During her mandatory military service, Moriya served as a drone instructor in the Intelligence Collection Corps, and after her release she moved to Eilat for more than a year to work and save up money for her travels.

She spent around five months traveling by herself around South America, and had returned to Israel not long before the Supernova rave, ready to start planning the next steps in her young life.

Her childhood friend, May Schechter, wrote on Instagram about their years of friendship, starting at age 10, and staying strong through “every birthday, every year-end school trip, the trip to Poland, every time we wanted to dress up and drink wine in the Carmel, to get coffee at sunset and to gossip for hours on the balcony.”

May wrote that it was impossible to sum up Moriya in words: “You are the most iconic, funny, random, crazy, impulsive, super anxious but the most brave person I know. You never give up until you achieve what you wanted, like switching jobs three times in the army or getting up and walking away from people who weren’t suited to you.”

“I miss our nonsense, our laughter, our Saturday night shopping trips,” she added. “It’s so not fair that you’re no longer here. It’s hard to think with every step what you would have said, what you would have done, what you would have felt, instead of you simply being here so I could hear you. It’s not fair that we won’t make any more memories together.”

Moriya’s mother, Sima, told a local Haifa news site that “Moriya was the prettiest girl in kindergarten, she always brought light everywhere she went. Wherever she was, there was so much light.”

She loved to travel and to follow her own path, said Sima: “She loved the feeling of freedom.”

Even a year after Moriya’s death, her mother said, “I wake up every morning to October 7… We try to be strong, but for us it is always October 7.”

Read more Those We Have Lost stories here.