Shani Ben Ami, 27: Talented singer who sewed Purim costumes

Shani Ben Ami, 27, from Holon, was murdered by Hamas terrorists while trying to flee the Supernova music festival on October 7.

She fled the site of the rave when the rocket fire began, seeking safety in a roadside bomb shelter at the entrance to the nearby Kibbutz Re’im, where she was slaughtered by Hamas.

She is survived by her parents, Anat and Ronen, and her older sisters Ortal and Nofar. She was buried on October 12 in Beit Dagan.

According to a eulogy on the Holon municipal website, Shani studied music in high school and was a “talented singer” as well as a designer and seamstress.

Shani worked as a waitress at the 2C restaurant in Tel Aviv and also performed around the country with the “Pupik” entertainment troupe. She loved to travel and had saved Instagram highlights from all of her recent trips abroad — NYC, Greece, Sinai, London and Barcelona.

She had a particular love of Purim, always designing and sewing her own costumes. Ahead of this year’s celebration, her friend Daniella Aperlev spoke to Army Radio about the initiative in her memory to collect and donate Purim costumes to those in need.

“Shani and I have been friends since age 12,” Aperlev told the radio station. “We were five friends, we grew up together in Holon, and Shani was the most unique possible. She was a person whose life goal was to be happy, to make others happy, and to do good. I can’t perfectly describe her.”

Aperlev said Shani would sew costumes for all her friends each Purim and also sell them to others, “always doing hers last, right when we had to walk out the door because she wanted to make sure everyone else was happy and satisfied first.”

Shani’s sister, Ortal Ben Ami, wrote on Instagram that as a child “I waited nine years for you to arrive, and you did. The most beautiful present I ever received. But I didn’t know it was for such a limited time. Only for 27 years.”

Ortal wrote that she, Shani and Nofar were always a “trio, everyone was jealous of our unique connection — something in the funny and stormy dynamic, something in our differences that just worked. Anything that happened to one of us we would immediately share with the others, our travels together, our parties. We always helped each other.”

And now, she wrote, “You will no longer accompany me through the different stations of my life, and I won’t accompany you… I promise to do everything so that we can recover as a family and be happy and travel because that’s what you would have wanted. We will immortalize you so that everyone will know what a loss it was to the world.”

One thing gives me some comfort, wrote Ortal, “that in your final moments, you were surrounded by nature, by friends that you loved, and that you laughed until you cried.”

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