Teen musician gets national platform to perform song she wrote for teacher killed Oct. 7

As Yaara Cohen mourned the deaths of her longtime music teacher, Shlomo Matias and his wife, Deborah Mathias, killed by Hamas terrorists in their home on October 7, she wrote a song in their memory.

“It came out right away, a complete song,” said Cohen. “The way I wrote it in my notebook is how it sounds now.”

The song is called “Grapefruit Tree,” and Cohen will perform it Thursday night at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem as part of a pre-Memorial Day performance called “All the Pain and All the Love, The Israeli Remembrance Soundtrack.”

She will be the only young, unknown musician performing, and will share the stage with headlining performers such as rocker Berry Sakharov, singer-songwriter Micha Sheetrit, composer Shem Tov Levi and singer Aya Zahavi Feiglin.

It’s a dream come true for Cohen, born from the very worst time of her 16 years of life.

She said she composed the song out of the deep love and appreciation she had for Mathias, an elementary music teacher who led the school choir, and taught Cohen and her classmates from third grade through sixth grade in Ein Habesor, the local school district for the Gaza border communities.

Cohen said Mathias helped guide her early music education.

“He was much more than my teacher, he was my friend,” said Cohen, who plays guitar and piano and has a special love for classic Israeli singers like Arik Einstein and Yoni Rechter, along with jazz. “I could already picture him attending my graduation recital in 12th grade.”

Cohen recalls meeting Mathias in elementary school, “the teacher with the biggest, widest smile I’d ever seen,” she said. At school ceremonies, “he’d always give me the solos,” she laughed.

Cohen lives in Moshav Ein Habesor in the south but happened to be in Eilat with her family on October 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked the region, killing at least 1,200 people and abducting 252 people to Gaza.

Within several days, Cohen’s entire moshav community was evacuated to Eilat, where she and her family spent the next three months in a hotel.

“I experienced it all from afar,” she said, “with phone calls and WhatsApps from my classmates. Everyone was sending messages about who was killed and who was kidnapped. It felt like we were in a movie.”

This image provided by Eran Shani shows Shlomi Mathias playing the guitar as his wife, Debbie ‘Shahar’ Mathias, laughs and sings next to him at her 50th birthday party in Lehavim, Israel, on October 1, 2023, days before they were killed in a Hamas terror attack as they protected their son. (Eran Shani via AP)

The names of those killed and taken hostage kept coming, among them Mathias and his wife, Deborah Mathias, known as Shahar, residents of Kibbutz Holit.

The couple was shot as they lay on top of their teenage son, Rotem, 16, trying to protect him. The bullet that killed Deborah Mathias pierced Rotem’s stomach, but he survived. Rotem’s older sisters, Shaked and Shir, were hiding elsewhere during the Hamas onslaught.

Cohen went to the memorial service held 30 days later at her teacher’s grave, which the couple’s three children had engraved with words from Matti Caspi’s song, “Everlasting Covenant.”

“I came back to the hotel, where I had my keyboard and another four guitars, and I just sat at the piano and it just came out,” said Cohen.

Shlomi Mathias, above and center, with his Ein Habesor students when they were still in elementary school; Yaara Cohen, now a budding musician, at the far right (Courtesy)

The sky is blue,
A grapefruit tree stands in the yard.
kids running around
Memories fly in the wind.

Matti Caspi’s notes,
Engraved on your grave.
You and she holding hands deep in the ground.

The sky is crying
Because some people should not die.
the sky is angry
Rain in the cemetery.

“That’s all I did in those first months,” said Cohen, “I just played and wrote songs, I played without stopping. That’s how I dealt with what happened. It was like therapy for me.”

Yaara Cohen, right, during her elementary school years, performing with her music teacher Shlomi Mathias, killed with his wife, Deborah Mathias, by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)

After she wrote “Grapefruit Tree,” Cohen was put in contact with The Music People, a grassroots project of the music industry that came together in the weeks after October 7, gathering musicians to play for survivors and evacuees from the north and south.

The organizers also collected young, lesser-known musicians from the north and south, including Cohen, and recorded their songs.

“It’s like points of light,” said Cohen, of having her song produced. “It’s the dream coming true from the worst time of my life that’s still going on.”

Yaara Cohen, 16, performing the song she composed for her music teacher Shlomi Mathias, killed with his wife, Deborah Mathias, by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)

Cohen thinks of her live performance at the National Library as the kind of event that her late teacher would have appreciated.

Writing “Grapefruit Tree” was just the start for Cohen, who’s thinking about an album of war songs about Mathias and others who were killed on October 7.

“I want to be a musician and I want these songs out in the world,” she said. “If it’s a world without Shlomi, then at least this will be in his memory.”

Entrance into “The Israeli Remembrance Soundtrack” event is free, with pre-registration at the National Library website.