Shlomi Sividia, 37: Software engineer with music ‘flowing in his veins’
Murdered while trying to flee the Supernova music festival on October 7
Shlomi Sividia, 37, from Ganei Tikva, was murdered by Hamas terrorists while fleeing the Supernova music festival on October 7.
Sividia attended the rave with his girlfriend, Lily Gurevitch, who was slain alongside him as they tried to flee the rocket fire. While at the festival, he bumped into his older sister, Jenny, and her boyfriend, who managed to survive and escape alive.
Jenny told CNN in early February that her brother and his girlfriend were “butchered on their way back home.”
He was buried on October 15 in Savyon. He is survived by his two sons, Tom, 4, and Geva, 3, as well as Jenny and his parents, Aviva and Eli.
Shlomi worked as a senior software engineer at ServiceNow and had a computer science degree from Ben Gurion University. He was remembered by his coworkers as a funny, engaging and hard-working employee who become a friend to many of them.
His friend and coworker Roy Konki wrote on a memorial site that he met Shlomi eight years earlier at ServiceNow, when “he stepped into my office with a huge smile and asked to speak about the topics HR and employees usually discuss. From that moment, we didn’t leave each other. We talked daily about everything, about love and basketball, and our love of basketball.”
“We traveled across Europe to watch games together,” he continued. “We played music together, in my house, in his house, everywhere. The music was our way to communicate, to share thoughts, and to feel. A few weeks ago I bought us tickets for a music concert by our favorite rock band. This was supposed to be my birthday present for him. This band played at Shlomi’s funeral. Rest in peace, my friend. I love you.”
Six weeks after October 7, Jenny told the Davar news outlet that “my story of survival is a story, but I mostly want people to know that I had a brother, his name was Shlomi, I loved him, and he was murdered.”
He was a huge lover of music, she said, “the notes literally flowed through his veins. He played the guitar, he sang, listened, performed, made playlists. He loved all genres, mainstream and underground, knew artists that nobody else did from in Israel and abroad. He also really loved trance, he went to festivals for the music. He didn’t even dance, he just wanted to hear new tracks, the way people go to a concert.”
Shlomi was an incredible father to his two sons, she said, a devoted coworker, a friendly neighbor who even learned basic Russian to connect with his elderly Russian neighbors, she learned during the shiva mourning period.
Jenny said that she’d long learned that friends and partners may come and go, “but a brother is forever. It was the only relationship in my life that stuck long term. It was meant to be me and him against the world… this is the hurdle that I think will be the hardest to overcome. After almost two months have passed, the adrenaline of survival has dissipated, and the understanding that Shlomi is not alive is only growing stronger.”
