Sofia Bongart, 21: Beloved sister attended rave with bestie
Murdered by Hamas terrorists while trying to flee the Supernova music festival on October 7
Sofia (Muriel) Bongart, 21, from Karmiel, was murdered by Hamas terrorists while trying to flee the Supernova music festival on October 7.
She attended the rave with her best friend, Liraz Nisan, who was also murdered that day. The pair sought safety in a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Be’eri, and were slain there along with at least seven others — including Raz Mizrahi and Kim Dukarker — when Hamas threw grenades inside the structure and opened fire.
Her mother, Anna, told Maariv that around 8 a.m. Sofia sent her a message “saying that she loved us and that she was blessed with us as parents.” That was the last they heard from her.
Sofia’s body was identified several days later. She was buried on October 10 in Carmiel.
She is survived by her parents, Anna and Vladislav, and her sister Evelina.
According to her friend, Alina Yankovich, Sofia was a “girl who loved life, and her smile never left her face.” Because of her “love for Judaism and for Israel, Sofia chose to convert and to become Jewish,” she wrote, noting that she pursued the goal for several years and was officially recognized as Jewish just two weeks before she was killed, “and never got to pick up the certification.”
On a memorial Instagram page set up for Sofia, her younger sister, Evelina, wrote to “my beautiful sister — what will I do without you, what am I supposed to do now?!?!”
Evelina said that she had dreams for the future of Sofia getting married and having kids, and Evelina “getting a boyfriend, and you would do my makeup and help me get ready and we would stay sisters like that forever, like best friends.”
“We wanted to open a TikTok together and do so many other cool things like that,” she added. “I always thought about how you would look as a grandma, that you’d be one of those cool grandmas but now I don’t know. I wanted to get a sister tattoo with you… You don’t know what I would give just to hug you one more time, to talk to you one more time.”
Her mother, Anna, wrote in December, “My beloved girl, it’s a shame that God took you so soon. You were our joy, our light. We love you to the heavens and we miss you so much.”
