Bereaved families mark Oct. 7 at Supernova massacre site
Families of the 364 revellers murdered by Hamas at the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, gathered on Monday at the site near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel to honour their fallen loved ones on the one-year anniversary of the massacre.
Families of the 364 revellers murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival converge on the site to mark the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre. Photo by Amelie Botbol.
Families arrived at 6.a.m. at the site, where makeshift memorials with pictures of those killed were set up.
At 6:29 a.m., the exact time at which Hamas terrorists launched their assault, music that had been playing was stopped and a commemorative siren sounded in the area.
The siren was followed by a minute of silence, during which the Israeli flag was lowered to half-mast. The song “The Children of Winter 2023” was played, and then the Yizkor prayer was recited.
Bereaved families recited the kaddish mourning prayer.
“Shani saved many people on Oct. 7, she saw terrorists arriving and blocked them with her car,” Yaakov Gabay, whose daughter Shani was killed while trying to escape the festival, told JNS at Monday’s ceremony.
“It’s even harder a year later. I come here a lot. I was here last Oct. 7 to look for Shani and I saved many people. I didn’t manage to save her, but it’s essential for me to be here because I know what happened,” he added.
On Oct. 7, Hamas massacred 364 of the approximately 3,500 participants and staff at the festival, with terrorists mutilating, raping and burning alive their victims.
Hamas terrorists kidnapped 43 people to Gaza, five of whom were released in November as part of a weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
On Jun. 8, Nova attendees Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, were freed by the IDF during a daring daylight raid in the heart of a crowded residential neighbourhood in Gaza.
On Aug. 31, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages from an underground tunnel in Rafah, five of them–Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Almog Sarusi, 25, Alexander Lobanov, 32, and Master Sgt. Ori Danino, 25–had been kidnapped from the festival.
The bodies of seven additional hostages have been rescued by the IDF.
Twenty-one Nova attendees remain in Gaza, with 17 presumed to be alive.
Ori Ohayon lost his sister Eden in the Nova massacre. “We are triplets, it’s like something happened to our body that day for me and my brother,” he told JNS on Monday. “We had lost contact for three days, we looked for my sister and my cousin and didn’t find anything. Then my mother received the news.
“We must commemorate them and remember them always. Grief and sadness will be part of everything I do in my life. Eden will accompany me everywhere,” added Ohayon.
