In the video: The first moments before the massacre at the nature party/documentation on social networks according to section 27A of the Copyright Law
The grief and loss from Black Saturday on October 7 grows as the scale of the disaster becomes clearer. The spouses of those murdered at the Nova Festival lost spouses, but they do not have official status and are therefore not entitled to emotional treatment or compensation from the state. They are not considered bereaved families and therefore did not even receive notification of the death from an official source, although some were about to get married, the families became friends, some lived together for years and shaped their lives. The dreams, hopes and future they hoped to experience together vanished on one difficult Saturday, but they are completely transparent to the state.
Due to the lack of status of the spouses, a large vacuum has been created that the state has not been able to address. That's when the Ella Center came in, providing emotional support in case of loss, trauma and sudden life crises. As of October 7, the organization has mobilized to provide individual and group mental health assistance to a wide range of populations, as well as spouses of murdered civilians who are not recognized by state institutions and are not eligible for assistance.
The association established nine support groups for the families of young men and women murdered at the Nova Festival and two additional support groups for the spouses of those murdered without status. Each group consists of about ten young women, coping with the sudden and cruel loss of their partner, guided by therapists with certification and experience in group facilitation.
Avishag and Yohai/Courtesy of the subjects
Avishag Kahlon, Yochai Ben Zakaria's spouse, painfully recounts the terrible loss: "I met Yochai through a good friend of mine. I knew her for many years but never personally, he was always under my nose but we never really knew. I knew he had a crush on me, but he was a year younger than me and I didn't think of him as an option. A year ago, I went on a trip to the Dead Sea with a friend and he had just called her and that's how the flame broke out."
"Suddenly I received a love I didn't think could be – a dream knight on the white horse," she said. "I didn't know how to deal with this level of love and how to explain how much I was in love," Avishag describes with eyes still in love with a man who is no longer with her. "We quickly moved in together and became inseparable. We were together all the time like a married couple. After six months, we started talking about getting married, but we didn't have the money for it. We decided to save money for the wedding and planned the proposal for 12.12 - today I'm so sorry we waited just because of the money."
On October <>, Yochai went to a party in Reim with a good friend of his, Danielle Cohen, who was also murdered at the party. "They bought tickets four months earlier and never stopped talking about her. On the Friday he went I had a strange feeling that it was a breakup, but I thought it was just because suddenly we're not together on Shabbat and it hasn't happened since we moved in together," Avishag continued, "At five o'clock in the morning he called me in a slightly stoned and drunk video and told me that he loved me and that I was the most beautiful in the world, even though I looked like a hedgehog. An hour later, he called again and said they were being evacuated because there were rockets and they were on their way home. I was glad he was coming back and went back to sleep."
Prolonging the act
Boost performance and enjoyment in bed - with an exclusive deal
In association with "Gavra"
"They bought tickets four months earlier and never stopped talking about her." Nova Party in Reim/official website, Ido Darby and Liav Franco
In an instant, Avishag's life turned upside down: "At 8 o'clock he calls again and says that terrorists have infiltrated. I hear gunshots and realize it's not the party. He shouts to someone to bring him a weapon that he is a fighter. I told him, 'Come home – don't be a hero.' He told me he didn't have a battery and hung up, and I never heard from him again."
"We tried to locate him through his friends who told me they lost him while fleeing and don't know where he is," Avishag continued, describing the sequence of events since contact was severed. "In the evening when it started getting dark I decided to post a picture of him on Instagram because I have a lot of followers online to see someone who saw him. After nothing helped and we didn't know where he was, on Sunday my father and brothers, along with my father and our dog, went down to the field to try to locate him. Suddenly, someone named Mazal calls me and knows Daniel and tells me that she hid with them and shot all three of them. Lucky was only injured and made herself dead, but she saw them shot and in bad shape. I didn't believe her and thought they would be found."
"On Friday, a week later, Yochai's father called my mother and told her to tell me that Yohai's body had been found," Avishag continues, unable to hold back tears. I am a widow without anyone recognizing me as a widow. I'm not officially a widow just because we didn't have the money to get married."
Avishag's journey in the face of the loss she experienced and the frustration of the terrible bureaucracy had just begun, and she decided to come to the Ella Center group after feeling that she needed help. "In this group, I suddenly felt that someone understood me. It's a long recovery journey but it starts with this group. All the bureaucracy made me feel unimportant and like it took everything I had with Yochai. I had to prove that we were going to get married in order to get compensation, I prayed that maybe I got pregnant from him so that I would have something from him. Suddenly you're alone without your other half, but no one sees you like that. In the group, for the first time, I got space for my feelings, but also for my relationship with Yochai. That's what I needed most – to be recognized for who we were."
Nofar and Daniel / Courtesy of the subjects
Nofar Stagg, 25, who turned seven in October, also had many dreams when she lost her partner Danielle Cohen, whom she met through mutual friends. "We went on a date and it was just love at first sight. We immediately knew we were together and we didn't even have to talk about it. After a few months, we moved in together and we've been together for four years. At seven o'clock, her mother told my parents that she bought me a ring, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I'm afraid she got lost there."
Nofar describes Danielle's last hours: "At 5:00 A.M. she called to tell me she loved me and danced and enjoyed herself, and at 6:30 A.M. she called to say they were closing the party because there were rockets. I didn't understand what was going on, I called the police and they said they knew there was an incident and that I was just catching the line. I kept trying to reach her, a little after nine Danielle called to say she loved me and had to hide because there were terrorists next to her and not call anymore. The gap between the five o'clock in the morning and four hours later at nine in the morning is very difficult. We wanted to grow old together like any other couple and connected our bills, but everything was cut short in an instant."
"She called to say she loved me and had to hide." Nova Party/Official Website, Ido Darby and Liav Franco
"From that day on, I felt like I had to wait by the phone for someone to remember me, but no official one spoke to me, even though in her difficult moments she talked to me and called me. I live in our shared house and feel so alone. We have three dogs and I take care of them without her and feel like a single mother," Nofar says with a sheepish laugh.
Nofar and Daniel lived together in an LGBT relationship. At first, she was apprehensive about entering the Ella Center's group, which is made up entirely of women who have experienced loss in heterosexual relationships: "Sometimes I feel that others look at LGBT relationships and intimacy not like heterosexual relationships. Until the association called me, I felt I had no validity for my loss, despite our strong and good relationship."
"Danielle set a very high bar of love for me and it will be a long process to reopen my heart. Everyone says, 'You're 25 years old and your whole life is ahead of you and you'll be someone else.' I feel like I'm not there at all and can't even think about it. I feel like I'm still with her and waiting for her to come back to me," Nofar concludes.
Amber and Tyre/Courtesy of the subjects
For Amber, Tzur Saidi's partner, the story is different because she is recognized as Tyre's common-law partner and therefore has legal status, but she too found comfort in the Ella Center group: "I met Tzur eight years ago through mutual friends. We lived together for the last four years and planned to move to Austria at the end of October for a year."
Tzur went to a party with his two best friends, Aviad and Roy - all three were murdered by Hamas terrorists. "Around eight o'clock in the morning they sent a message that they were okay and they were with a big bunch, that there was a traffic jam and they were on their way and everything was fine," Amber describes as going back in time. "Today we know that it was the traffic jam that led to the murder of many."
"Fifteen minutes later I called him and he was nervous that it was very out of character for him, but he tried to calm me down and said they were trying to get them out. Around him, I heard girls shouting and shooting - the call was cut off and you didn't have time to respond. This is our last conversation, in which I understood that the situation is difficult."
"At 8:30 A.M., Tyre called his father and said his two friends were seriously and moderately injured," Amber continues. "At that point, they were joined by a soldier who was at a party with a tank in which everyone had fallen and he managed to escape - from whom we know most of Tyre's story. They moved the wounded to the back of the car and tried to escape, but they were blocked from everywhere, in the end they stopped and tried to make themselves dead. After that, unarmed terrorists caught them, they tried to steal the soldier's weapon and apparently in the end succeeded and that's how they died."
"We didn't understand where or where the army was, but we understood that we had to rescue them ourselves. A friend of the father of one of them went out alone to rescue them, he managed to locate them and took them independently to Kaplan, but he already understood that their situation was not good and in fact that's how I understood that the worst happened," Amber says painfully.
Amber and Tzur were well known, but she still felt she needed a treatment tailored to her situation: "After the anger and pain dissipated a bit, I looked for girls who were going through who I went through. I felt that the families didn't understand what I was going through. They also go through the moment you walk into a room and straight away all eyes are on you – which is a weight I've been carrying with me since that damn day. The hard eyes and looks, there is silence to every room I come to. I understand this from those around me, but to finally walk into a room where you're not unusual and don't stop a conversation because you came in - it was like breathing air. I feel there as if I were an ordinary human being, and not in the way of a person whose world was destroyed in an instant. I feel like it's easier for me than the whole team. At seven o'clock, a representative from the National Insurance Institute came and told me what my situation was and what I was entitled to, she gave me her personal email so that it would be easy for me logistically and technically."
"The feeling is that one day you enter a life that is as if it is not yours, suddenly I experience tantrums, secret crying in the middle of the day a lot of pain and rage. The whole dynamic with my surroundings has completely changed and talking about it with the environment doesn't help, helplessness is hard. We are at the age of 27, in the middle of life I became a widow. It's not the end of life, we didn't accomplish anything together. I mourn for what Tyre I lost, but also for the future life I thought we would have. There was nothing in the planning of my life that had nothing to do with Tyre, it was intertwined with everything. It's mourning for him and the life I thought I would have and lost. I hope I can open my heart and love again," Amber concludes.
Racheli Tzafri, mother of one of the participants in the group and the initiator of the group, spoke about the difficulty she experienced since October 7, and the terrible message she made to her daughter Amit due to the government's incompetence. "I was so shocked by the fact that my daughter, who lost such a great love, has no recognition and it starts with the basic thing of announcing his murder and I was the one who had to tell her," she shared. "I thought about how to help her with her deep grief, to cope emotionally with the loss of Jordan, and there was no appropriate framework for her and her spouses in the same situation."
Racheli spoke about the Ella Center, and about the desire for a future so that no one will be left behind. "I decided that I would not give up and would open a group that could provide an individual emotional response, especially a group one, because the group has tremendous power for healing," she said. "I turned to the amazing Gaia Koren, she agreed to help me and contacted the "Ella Center" association, which immediately picked up the gauntlet and opened the support group for young people who lost the love of their lives on 7.10 free of charge. I see how Amit waits for this weekly meeting like a breath of fresh air and really, really hopes that more and more young men and women will take the step and sign up for such a group so as not to be left alone with grief and loss."
Shahar Mizrahi, drama therapist, therapist and facilitator of one of the girls' and couple's therapy groups at the Ella Center, explains: "This is a very unique and unusual group, exciting and powerful. In the group there are young men and women who, in one cruel moment, lost their partner, that one who saw a future together and woke up to another reality forced upon them. As someone who accompanies quite a few groups of loss, loss is loss, and it is very difficult, and here there is a different kind of loss - a shared reality, one could say a shared destiny, they lost the other half at the same time, at the same ages, and therefore the recovery will be shared.
Mizrahi described the special connection created in the group he counsels, in which men and women of all ages share a difficult past but nevertheless manage to undergo a therapeutic procedure together. "The sharing? The embrace together, learning from each other, supporting each other and strengthening together. Everything is carried out slowly and forward-looking. Unlike other groups, here a friendship is really formed between the participants, that they lift and strengthen each other even beyond group time, which is not customary in group therapy."
In conclusion, Mizrahi talks about the most painful subject, the issue of recognition that no participant in the group deserves. "The fact that there is no recognition or status for these young people in our country, the need for accompaniment and assistance is very significant, because their pain has legitimacy. And that can't be taken away from them. And we need to make sure that some of us find it difficult for them and we need to give them the opportunity to pick up the pieces looking forward."
- More on the subject:
- Murdered
- chef
- murder
- Black Saturday
- Iron Sword War