Nova families gather to mourn loved ones killed when festival became a bloodbath

Hundreds of bereaved parents, siblings, children and others gathered Sunday at the Hangar 11 event hall in Tel Aviv for a memorial ceremony for families that lost loved ones at the October 7 Nova festival massacre, exactly a year ago.

Outside the hall, at the Tel Aviv Port entertainment district, an altar had been set up where participants could light candles for the dead. Nearby, a specially commissioned neon art installation resembling a glowing tree provided a surreal touch next to a huge screen that rotated through images of the partygoers who lost their lives that day.

“Time flies. I don’t believe it’s been a year. It’s like a dream I want to wake up from,” said Ofri Rahum, a young woman who had come to mourn several victims.

Rahum’s sister, who was four months pregnant, her sister’s fiancé, and Rahum’s uncle were all killed at the Nova party.

“It’s as if they went on a trip, and we are waiting for them to come back,” she said.

“All the families are here, that’s very important. It’s good for the heart, a bit,” she added softly, before moving on to greet family and friends in the gathering crowd.

The memorial event was put together by the Tribe of Nova Community Association to “strengthen and honor the bereaved families,” and to commemorate the 410 people killed at the Nova festival and other outdoor raves outside Re’im also attacked that day, according to organizers. Israeli authorities say at least 364 people were killed at the Nova festival alone, turning the celebratory event into a byword for death, destruction and horror.

“I can’t digest that my beloved daughter was shot on her way home, while in her car. She had left the house to go to a beautiful festival, of music and peace,” said Orin Zach-Gantz, mother of Eden Zacharia, who was killed at the festival.

The Hangar 11 event was one of dozens this week marking one year since the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, which saw some 1,200 people killed and 251 kidnapped to Gaza, sparking the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. According to authorities, 97 hostages remain in Gaza including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF. Many of the hostages were abducted from the Nova festival

Grassroots movement

The Tribe of Nova organization was founded in a grassroots way by surviving staff of the Nova festival immediately after October 7, and “in the last year, has done hundreds of events and activities,” said Sarel Botavia, one of the organizers.

Botavia, who said he had lost 40 friends on October 7, recently returned from the Burning Man festival in Nevada. He and other Israelis had set up a Nova memorial site at the Black Rock Desert gathering, part of the group’s effort to “spread light all over the world,” he said.

The two-hour ceremony featured a collective Yizkor (remembrance) prayer for the fallen, speeches by family members, and short performances by musical artists including Shlomi Shabat, Shiri Maimon and Yuval Dayan, who performed her hit “Until You Return,” a melancholy ballad about a lost love.

The evening was hosted by media personality and singer Guy Zuaretz, who lost a nephew at the party. Unlike a memorial set up at the Re’im festival site, the Hangar 11 ceremony was not open to the public, giving the somber event an intimate air despite being held in a huge venue that usually functions as a concert hall or dance club.

Speaking to several hundred other bereaved relatives, Zach-Gantz tearfully said she was “still in denial” about what happened to her daughter at the festival.

For a time Zacharia’s fate was unclear, but it was later determined that she was likely shot and killed on October 7, with her body taken to Gaza. Her remains were recovered in an IDF operation in December.

“I am a bereaved mother, but I don’t accept that word. They ask me how it feels after a year, but I am still stuck in the seventh of October. The world goes on, but for me, time stands still,” she said.

The terrorists “succeeded in their attack, no doubt they murdered my daughter… I swear to you Eden… they won’t win the war,” she added forcefully.

Nir Schlesinger, whose father Asaf was killed on October 7 while leading the festival’s medical team, struggled to describe the enormity of the loss.

“There are no words in this world that can encompass what we went through and are still going through,” Schlesinger said. “You won’t be at my wedding… We won’t laugh together anymore about silly things, you won’t remind me to take care of my car, and we won’t talk enough.”

Shlesinger said he used to fight to get his father “off my back” and “not to interfere,” but now would give anything “for one more nagging, one last conversation.”

Days in hell

Mishel Iluz, whose son Guy was abducted from the festival and later died in Gaza, used the platform to press demands by hostages’ families for a deal with Hamas to free their loved ones.

“Who could have believed that we would be standing here today, after a year has passed, and there are still another hundred abductees besides our Guy who are in Gaza,” said Iluz, who was speaking as a representative of the Hostage and Missing Families Forum.

“We have not done enough as a country, and certainly the government [hasn’t], to bring our children home in a deal,” he said.

He demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu call off rescue operations that endanger both soldiers and hostages, instead calling for “an immediate deal” to return both living hostages and the bodies of those who had died in captivity.

At the event was one of the handful of former hostages rescued by the Israel Defense Forces, Noa Argamani, who spoke of her abduction from the party. The kidnapping was famously caught on video, with Argamani, squeezed onto a Hamas motorcycle, seen reaching out for her boyfriend Avinatan Or, who remains captive in Gaza, but her comments appeared to be her first public description of what happened to her.

Argamani softly explained how she and Or, along with a few other friends, had decided at the last minute to attend the festival, arriving at 4:30 in the morning.

By 6:30 a.m. the festival was already under attack, first from rockets fired from Gaza and soon after by gun-toting Hamas-led terrorists.

“We drove toward the exit and suddenly they started shooting at us. We turned and everywhere we went we were shot at,” she recalled.

Separated from her friends, whom she later learned had been killed, “Avinatan and I continued to flee in the vehicle until it got stuck… We hid in the forest for hours until a group of terrorists found us,” Argamani said.

The terrorists seized them and “put me on a motorcycle… that was actually the last moment I saw my love, Avinatan Or… after a few minutes I suddenly found myself in the middle of the Gaza Strip,” she said, where she “lived in fear every day, under extreme conditions, for 246 days.”

When she was finally rescued in a daring IDF operation in June, “I got my life back, but only after I came back did I understand the magnitude of the disaster,” Argamani said. “We need to do everything to return the living abductees to their families, and the dead to a proper burial in Israel.”

The evening formally ended with “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, and the crowd slowly filtered outside for a last round of talking, crying and laughing.

The Nova community’s resilience and organization post-October 7 is something that “should be taught,” said Tribe of Nova CEO Solly Laniado, who said he recently accepted the post as a form of “reserve duty” after a career as a lawyer and businessman.

“We have people who saw the most terrible things, and still found the power to embrace themselves and others, and come and say, ‘We will dance again, we will live again,'” he said.