The Stones & Posters of Our Loss
I was invited to the Memorial Ceremony yesterday at Kfar Azza, one of the hardest hit kibbutzim, on the national day of mourning for victims of the Hamas massacres on October 7th.
It was shocking to see an entire section of a cemetery in which everyone died on the same day. Whether they were 20 or 65, the date of their death was October 7, 2023. Parents and children. In some cases, whole families wiped out.
Kfar Azza’s last hostages came home this week – the 28-year-old twins Ziv and Gali Berman – who had never been separated but were held captive in isolation from each other. They are back together and back in Israel.
We have been following the Kfar Azza community the most closely because of the Moriah Fund’s support for the Kfar Azza Foundation which my nephew heads – for and we felt a sort of connection to these two because they are exactly one week older than our own twin sons.
The Bermans were not at this ceremony. The returned hostages had not left their hospitals yet, at their own request. The shock of society is too great after two years in captivity, most of it spent in tunnels, some with no contact with any other hostage, with anyone but their jailers.
The Kfar Azza community is not waiting for any bodies, so as a community, this chapter has ended. I’m sure it will take time to internalize this shift.
At the ceremony, there was one roll-up of all the residents and workers of Kfar Azza who were murdered and another of all the soldiers killed fighting to free survivors at Kfar Azza. The fighting went on there for three days.
One of the speakers, a young woman whose father was murdered, spoke about how the grief doesn’t stop, that there is no closure, no optimistic message or encouraging words to share.
I imagine the grief over how many people are missing might become more potent now that the focus is no longer on getting their last members back from Gaza.
I don’t know what extraordinary stuff they are made of that they want to go back and live there again. Except that it was their home and their community and family that were violated, and that can’t be the last word.
We went afterward to the site of the Nova Festival, 15 minutes away, which has been turned into a startling memorial. There is a poster on a wooden stick for each of the 378 people murdered there, which includes their photo and a short biography of that person. On both the posters and larger memorials, one side is in English, the other in Hebrew.
Inbar Hayman, a graffiti artist, was in the same program as our daughter in Visual Communications at WIZO-Haifa. She was kidnapped from the Nova Festival and taken to Gaza where she was murdered. Her remains were returned from Gaza yesterday. Our daughter never met her because she started her studies last year, after Inbar had been abducted and murdered.
The vast majority of the victims were young, mostly in their 20s, some in their 30s, some teenagers. It’s an entire forest of dead young people, extending as in all directions.
There are also more elaborate memorials for some of the victims, the size of public bulletin boards, with printed collages of photos and in some cases, artwork, and more detailed biographical tributes. They are not standardized. Each has its own style. On the right is a memorial for two sisters murdered at the festival.
The descriptions sound remarkably consistent.
- They were free spirits.
- They loved nature.
- They loved music.
- They were creative.
- They were caring.
- They were giving.
- They were kind.
Some included their army service, some were killed as soldiers, but the vast majority of the descriptions spoke about their general goodness, their hopes and their innocence.
The photos are largely of these young people at the age of their death, perhaps so as not to suggest a bar mitzvah or wedding slide show, tracking them sweetly as they grow older. There are no pictures of them as children. They are frozen in time roughly at the age their lives came to an end.
Matan Lior was a hero.
He was charismatic and determined, the owner of “Sound Fanatic” which had reputation as a leader in quality sound systems for outdoor and nature-based events and concerts. He completed a degree in brain research and was interested in neurology, physiology and botany. He worked with cancer patients, with people on the spectrum and with people with special needs. He served as an outstanding commander with the Golani Reconnaissance unit in the IDF.
He realized early on that something was wrong, and went on stage under fire and grabbed the mike and told people to leave immediately, telling them again and again. He rescued his girlfriend and her friend, who both survived, and went back under fire to rescue many others, returning time and again he was killed.
Matan’s grandmother was my Hebrew School teacher when I was 11. I was one of her favorite students, perhaps because I spoke the best Hebrew in the class, thanks to one summer in Camp Ramah. I knew his father and his uncle as boys.
An artist, Amir Chodorov, made a photo montage of all the people murdered on that one morning on October 7th 2023 at the Nova Music Festival.
It is overwhelming. All these young people, who just wanted to dance, and feel free on a Jewish holiday that fell on Shabbat.
That’s the main thing I wanted to share. The underlying grief that explains the ecstatic joy we felt this week watching hostages and their families reunited.
CODA
I think what people who don’t live here miss two things about Israel: how connected we all are, how small this place is.
And how we have been reliving October 7th every day, going to funerals, through the news accounts with a daily segment about a hostage or hostage family or a fallen soldier (more than 900), week after week attending rallies for the hostage families and protests against our obscene government, reading accounts of freed hostages, horrified about what they were going through, a thrumming dread preventing us from fully enjoying anything.
We passed signs to three other monuments on the way to the Nova Memorial to the worst murder killing in Israel’s history. The others had nothing to do with October 7th. The two pocket parks within three blocks of our apartment where we had our kids’ birthday parties and walked our dog for 15 years, both have monuments to teenagers murdered by terrorists, murders that happened around the corner while we were living there.
This is a traumatized society. Our empathy for Gazans and their suffering has disappeared. I know that. I’m shocked and I’m not surprised.
Violent death is a part of life here, and yet, we refuse to accept that, and that creates profound cognitive dissonance. We don’t want to live that way, in that kind of world. Each time it happens we are caught off guard, our world upended. It’s absolutely exhausting. And we have no patience for people who judge us, who have no inkling of what this sort of life is like.
Maybe this is a turning point. Maybe. One thing I’ve learned living here is that we need to have hope but we shouldn’t get our hopes up.
