Isabella Gandlin, 27, had gone to dance with her fiancée two weeks before their wedding. Ron Yehudai, 24, had just got back from his big post-army tour of South America and had managed to squeeze in a trip to Thessaloniki to see his favorite football team, Beitar, play. Nadav Bartal, 24, had gone to a party with his two best friends. Dor Malka, 29, had gone to sell clothes and jewelry at a stand with a friend.And when Hamas terrorists broke through the southern security fence in the early morning of October 7, under cover of a barrage of rocket fire from Gaza, they were among the 364 revelers who were brutally murdered at the Nova desert dance rave at Kibbutz Re’im. Now, four months later, their families and loved ones are left in a world that has no day or night, which no longer makes any sense and, say many of them, has already moved on, leaving them to struggle with their trauma and multitude of treatments on their own.
“He loved life, wine and football. He was young and beautiful. They were all young and beautiful,” said Ron Yehudai’s father, Yoram Yehudai, 60. He had come to Jerusalem from Yehud on February 7 with some 300 other family members of victims of the Nova massacre for a memorial service in front of the Knesset. They want to have their voices heard and make sure the victims are not forgotten amid war and attempts to free the hostages. As Yoram Yehudai recalled, “He went to a party with eight friends, and he was the only one who did not return.”
Ron managed to evade the terrorists and finally hid in a trash dumpster, but at 11:47, eight minutes after his parents last heard from him, terrorists shot everyone in the dumpster.Like others at the march, his wife, Sigal, clutched a framed photo of her son. She carried a bouquet emblazoned with Ron’s favorite slogan: “You only live once, just f***ing do it,” to be placed at the foot of the Knesset menorah in memory of her son.“I am here, but I still don’t understand what I am doing here,” she said, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “I don’t understand what this has to do with me. I am still waiting for him to call. Maybe he is still on his trip to South America. I live on pills.”It is important for the families that the names of the victims – at least some of them – be remembered, said Sigalit Shemer from Tel Aviv, whose son, Ron, 23, was murdered at the dance party, and who spearheaded the memorial and has been trying to galvanize the group.“We need our voices heard; we need to be seen. We feel invisible,” she said.Nadav Bartal’s parents lost contact with their son at 9:22 a.m. and at 1 pm his father and the parents of his two friends, Gal Dan Guri and Ofek Ravia, drove down from Beit Aryeh to find them. Using the last location sent by Nadav they were able to find their bodies hidden in bushes.“They put their bodies in the car and we buried them the next day,” said Natali Bartal, 48. “Since October 7 we haven’t heard from anybody from the government, nobody came. All day we are crying. There is life before October 7 and there is life after October 7. We got some mental health sessions, but there are so many WhatsApp groups and so many groups it is hard to follow (what they offer).”As a member of the committee that organized the march, Yehudai said the government was not taking the families’ needs seriously and while different governmental bodies have offered some mental health and medical interventions it, has all been done haphazardly, with too many authorities involved confusing families who are traumatized and not able to assess all the information.
No special arrangements for NOVA massacre families
Unlike the families of massacre victims from the kibbutzim and other border communities who have been evacuated and are largely still together in hotels, and have in place their social frameworks to handle the myriad issues the victims’ families are confronting, the families from the Nova dance party come from all over the country and have no such framework, he said.Emily Gandlin, 21, sister of Isabella – whose fiancée survived the massacre – said coming to the march from Ashdod was a way of connecting with others who are going through the same trauma as they are.Her family rarely goes out now, she said, and doesn’t meet many people to avoid the look of pity or “condolences” every time they do go out. The first week they were visited by psychologists, she said, but they feel that they have been forgotten now.“I want them to hear us, to hear our feelings,” she said. “We need the government to put together one centralized body that will sift through all this information (about the rights and treatments and rehabilitation available for families) and present it to the families in an organized way, so they can get the help that they need,” Yehudai said. “I am still in trauma. I am still in the trash dumpster with Ron. I live in that trash dumpster. There is a lot of anger. We have been abandoned now, and the kids were abandoned then. No one came to save them. Not the army, not the ambulances, not the paramedics. Some bled to death. “But we will deal with that later, after the war, when whoever needs to pass judgment will pass judgment on whomever didn’t do what they needed to do, from the chief of staff to the minister of defense and – I don’t know if he is responsible, but he is the person who stands at the head of it all – the prime minister.”While the release of the hostages is justifiably a top priority, and news of the fighting in Gaza and soldiers making headline news, the victims of the Nova party slaughter should nevertheless not be forgotten, he said.Shlomo Journo, whose 24-year-old niece Karine Journo was murdered, said he had hoped that at least some representative of the government would come to greet them, but was not surprised that nobody made an appearance to support the families.“I didn’t have high expectations, so I am not disappointed,” he said.Representatives of the ZAKA Search and Rescue, who helped identify the bodies of the dance party victims, attended the memorial, and Rabbi Chnaior Gol from ZAKA led them in reciting the Kaddish. He broke down when he told the crowd that many of the ZAKA members who had been at Re’im that day had found it too difficult to attend the memorial and were afraid to face the families of the victims whom they helped identify. They had seen horrors, with bodies mutilated and tortured, he said.“Behind every picture, every poster here we see the mother, father, brother the family behind the people we identified,” he said, his voice cracking. “We believe in this unity and we are all here for one another. And the way of not forgetting the dead is in this unity.”At the conclusion, some of the mothers grasping photographs pressed toward Gol, begging to know if he could remember seeing their child. Sigal Yehudai broke down crying when he was able to confirm he had seen her son, Ron, among the victims in the trash dumpster.