Yarden Buskila, 25: Hi-tech worker who loved extreme sports

Yarden “Jordi” Buskila, 25, from Kfar Masaryk, was murdered by Hamas terrorists while trying to flee the Supernova music festival on October 7.

Yarden attended the rave with a group of friends, and when the rocket fire began, they decided to flee via car. But when the car was shot at, they jumped out to run for safety. Most of them ran to the right, but Yarden’s friend Daniel Sheinkerman headed left, and Yarden decided to follow him, and they were both slain by Hamas while the rest of the passengers survived.

His parents didn’t know that he was attending a rave next to the border with Gaza until after the attack, and they searched for word of him for four days until his body was identified.

Yarden was buried in Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk on October 13. He is survived by his parents, Merav and Shimon, his older siblings Liad and Sapir, and his girlfriend Amit.

Born and raised in Kfar Masaryk in the Western Galilee, Yarden enlisted in the IDF’s prestigious 8200 intelligence unit after completing high school. He stayed on for an additional year following the mandatory period, and after his release he moved to Tel Aviv with his girlfriend, Amit, according to a state eulogy.

There he started working in hi-tech, getting jobs in a number of startups, most recently the software company Spot by NetApp. Kevin McGrath, who was at the time a VP at Spot, wrote on Linkedin that Yarden was “a bright young product manager, who had all the positive energy in the world and a promising life ahead of him.”

Yarden enjoyed several hobbies, his loved ones said, including carpentry and hydroponic gardening, and also loved to travel and take part in extreme sports around the world, including kite surfing, skiing and snorkeling — visiting Iceland, Australia, Sri Lanka and more.

His girlfriend, Amit Tzafri, wrote on Instagram to “my soulmate… the purest creation in this world.”

“I got to live by your side, to build a home with you, to wake up with you in the morning and to kiss you good night,” she added. “To cry to you about all the pain in my heart, that only you knew, and all the joy in my heart, that you knew better than anyone. The way you looked at me, with stars in your eyes, I wish I could see myself one day the way you saw me, and believe in myself the way you believed in me.”

In a memorial video produced by Ynet, Yarden’s parents spoke about how much their son had accomplished in his short life.

“Yarden took life by storm, he was a very creative kid, he had a creative way of thinking, he thought about what could he bring into this world, what can he create that could help the world,” said his mother, Merav. “He always had thoughts like that. He was also very creative with his hands, he built things out of wood.”

Shimon said that as his youngest, Yarden was the one with whom he “fixed” his approach to fatherhood.

“We had a very unique relationship, we spoke about everything, everything in the most open and free way, conversations whose absence I feel so strongly now,” he said.

Yarden, he said, was a man of social connections, “I couldn’t believe how a kid at age 25 could have touched thousands of people. If he managed that by age 25, who knows what else he could have kept doing.”

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