Naomi Dgani, 80: Retired nurse who was ‘sensitive and sentimental’
Murdered by Hamas terrorists in her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7
Naomi Dgani, 80, was murdered by Hamas terrorists in her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7.
She was targeted by a sniper, her sister Tammy Nir-Peretz told a local news site. “She had left the safe room for a second and the terrorists identified her and just shot her. She died on the spot.”
Her body was discovered two days later and she was buried in Kibbutz Shefayim on October 22. She is survived by her four children — Anat, Yoni, Dror and Lilach — several grandchildren and her siblings, Tammy, Aharon and Hannah. She was predeceased by her husband, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and for whom she had cared for five and a half years before his death.
Naomi grew up in Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the north, and settled in Kfar Aza, adjacent to Gaza, in the 1960s. She was a nurse throughout her professional life — first working for the kibbutz, and then with preemies at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center until her retirement.
According to an official government eulogy, her family wrote of the void left by her murder and the comfort they took in the fact that on the morning of October 7, she managed to speak one last time on the phone with some of her children and grandchildren.
She “joked around with them. Naomi was a loving, cheerful, smiling, optimistic, sensitive and sentimental woman who lived her life with a sense of simplicity, giving, compassion and empathy towards others.”
Naomi was also the main source of inspiration for new lyrics written by her extended family for Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire,” following the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7.
Her family members — her cousin Vered Raz, and Raz’s husband and daughter, Tzachi Gatzek and Gali Gatzek — put together this new version. “It’s the personal and the national,” said his wife, Raz.
Her nephew, Or Alterman, reminisced about his time with his aunt in the kibbutz during the Gulf War, when Kfar Aza was “the safest place in the country. My beloved uncle and aunt took care of me until things quieted down.”
He went on to say that “on one of my last visits to Kfar Aza, Naomi took me for a ride on her scooter along the trails of the kibbutz. We went through all the places ingrained in my childhood memories.”
