Escaping the terror of the Nova music festival

Eden Shmuel, a 32-year-old lawyer from Rishon LeZion, was looking forward to the music festival in Re’im that began on October 6 last year. It was going to be a time to be with close friends, a chance to dance, relax, and celebrate life.

Eden Shmuel and her friend, Shira Cohen, recently spoke at Congregation Shir Shalom in New City.

The trance music festival, produced by an organizer called Nova, started on the afternoon of Simchat Torah. The electronic dance music is popular all over the world; there are trance festivals throughout Europe, South America, South Africa, India, and Israel. “Followers stick together like a family,” Ms. Shmuel said. “They travel all over just to hear the most popular DJs. When I listen to trance music, I have a feeling of freedom. I can dance like no one is watching me. It’s also time for me to be myself.”

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Ms. Shmuel met her friend Shira Cohen, 28, of Ramat Gan, about 30 minutes from Rishon LeZion, in Mexico two years ago. Their friendship was immediate and made even stronger when they realized that they loved the same music.

On September 7, just a month before the Nova festival, Ms. Cohen’s brother, Aria, 22, was killed by a drunk driver.

Ms. Shmuel says that initially she was hesitant about going because she’d spent the day at the beach. “I was hot and tired and wanted to go home and sleep, but my friends thought it would be good to come out and dance,” she said. “Besides, it’s a mitzvah to celebrate on Simchat Torah. You need to be happy.”

Ms. Cohen’s closest friend and co-worker, Livnat Levi, encouraged Ms. Shmuel and Ms. Cohen to go to the party. So did two other good friends, Hadar Hoshen and Mayyan Manzor. All lovers of trance music, the young women had formed a tight bond.

Ms. Cohen worried about whether it was a good idea to go to a celebration so soon after her brother’s death, but she decided to overcome those qualms. “Aria really loved trance music,” Ms. Shmuel said. “Shira wanted to go for him. She told me later that when she was dancing, she felt like she was dancing with Aria.”

Ms. Shmuel explained that in Israel, organizers don’t let festival-goers know where a rave will be until a few hours before it’s set to begin. “They keep us on our toes and it adds to the excitement,” she said. “We don’t know if it will be in the forest or the woods or the desert. We might only be told ‘It’s three hours from Tel Aviv,’ for example.”

“We got the location that night,” Ms. Shmuel said. “It was 5 kilometers from Gaza, in Re’im, in the desert. We all drove together, me and Shira and Livnat and Hadar and Mayyan.

“It’s an amazing experience arriving at the festival,” she continued. “All you see are beautiful faces around you — the backdrop of the festival is amazing, with colorful tents and colorful clothes and a mix of rocks and sand. The food trucks are lined up and the stages are lit up and everything, to the smallest detail, is a sight to see. There is so much energy, euphoria, and love. We join people of all ages, all colors, all countries. It is very special.”

The group got to the rave at 2:30 a.m., “to a mix of beats of music and people celebrating,” Ms. Shmuel said. “We put our stuff down — chairs, small carpets, sleeping bags, grills, coolers with food, drinks — and we left them there to dance.”

At 5 a.m., as the sun came up, Ms. Shmuel described seeing people’s faces. “Some people come just to see the sunrise,” she said.

“My friend from high school, Eynav Elkayam, and her husband, Or, dropped their baby with Eynav’s mother and drove toward the festival just when the sun was coming up. When missiles started to fall, they stopped at a bomb shelter — they knew what to do when rockets sounded.”

At sunrise, Ms. Shmuel told her friends “for the 100th time” that she had to use the bathroom. She was uncomfortable going alone at night, but once the sun came up, she wasn’t worried. “Livnat told the other girls: ‘go with her!’ she said. But Shira said, ‘she’s a big girl, she can go alone.” Ms. Shmuel recalls that at that moment, Livnat touched Shira’s face in a gesture of friendship and devotion. “Do you know how much I love you?” Livnat said to Shira. “Of course,” Shira told her.

Ms. Shmuel watched the two of them hug as she made her way toward the restrooms. At 6:30, her mother, Rimona, called her on her cell to ask “Where are you? There’s an attack on Israel!”

“I told her that everything was okay,” Ms. Shmuel said. “The music was still playing.

I promised her, if something was happening, I would go to a safe place.”

She said that she walked into the restrooms feeling as though she was in a dream — the euphoric music, the festive dancing, the exotic atmosphere, the magnificent sunrise all mesmerized her. “But when I got out of the bathroom, it was like a nightmare,” she said.

“Sirens were sounding. The music had stopped. The DJ was announcing: Red Alarm! Tzeva Adom! People were running around screaming, looking for their friends. Everyone was lying on the ground, protecting their heads. Rockets were firing, hitting the Iron Dome. The sky was turning black. Shira called me. She said, ‘Don’t move. I’m coming to you!’ But policemen had put a barrier at the entrance to the restroom so no one else would come in. They wanted to empty the restroom.

“We were told to go to a safe space, but there was no safe space to go.”

When Ms. Cohen and Ms. Shmuel reunited, they went to the tent where their other friends were waiting. “I wanted to go home, but some people wanted to smoke a cigarette or make coffee to wait out the rocket fire,” Ms. Shmuel said. We are accustomed to this in Israel.” She said that a friend told her, “It’s okay, girl. It’s just rockets. Chill. It will all be over soon.”

“We saw a policewoman — her name was Debbie, I saw her badge. We asked her what we should do. She said, ‘If you have a car, take your car and go away.’”

Assuming that Debbie knew something they didn’t know, the girls followed her instructions and ran in the same direction as everyone else. “Debbie stayed in the party area, telling people what to do,” Ms. Shmuel said. “She helped many people to escape.”

Shira, Eden and Mayyan arrived at the emergency exit where there were thousands of cars. There were 5,000 people at the rave, not including food vendors, DJs, performers, and crew. The women couldn’t grasp the immensity of the chaos. “The sky, filled with rockets, had turned black,” Ms. Shmuel said. “We saw everything on that day. It looked like a movie from hell.

“Our car was really, really far away, and we were really, really scared. A random guy saw us and asked another random driver, named Shlomo, to take us to a safe place. Shira asked Livnat and Hadar if they were focused enough to find our car.”

Ms. Shmuel explained that there are people who drink and take drugs at these festivals. “We don’t,” she said, “but it was still important to know that they could act quickly.

“While Livnat and Hadar went to get the car, Shlomo, a stranger who became a friend, put us in the first bomb shelter he found, about seven minutes away. We squeezed inside with 20 other people.”

Ms. Shmuel described a small room filled with dust and grime and garbage and urine and cigarette butts. “The smell was terrible, so some people stepped outside for a moment to relax.

“People from the party, people from local kibbutzim, people who were walking their dogs came out to talk. We told each other, ‘We’re all together, we don’t have a reason to worry, we’ll go home soon.’

“I sent our location to Livnat and Hadar on WhatsApp and confirmed they’d received the message. Someone said, ‘We heard rumors that there are terrorists in Israel!’ We didn’t pay attention. We assumed they were imagining things because they were really high from the drugs.

“Someone else said, ‘There are no terrorists, it’s just rockets.’”

Ms. Shmuel recalled the moment when a man running toward their bomb shelter began screaming in a deep cry. He sounded like an animal. “The sounds came from his heart and throat and gut,” she said.

“‘Get away now!’ he yelled. He was screaming so loud — telling us to do what we could to save our lives.

“I’ll never forget the sound of his voice,” Ms. Shmuel said. “At that point you can’t move or breathe or think. You know there’s a huge lion coming to catch you and you cannot make instant decisions.” Fortunately, Ms. Cohen noticed a man with a photo of his baby on his cellphone’s screensaver. He was with his wife. She knew for certain he would do anything to fight for his life. “Everyone got out,” she said. “And Shira, Mayyan, and I got into this man Shimon’s car, along with his wife. I saw Shira touch the necklace that Aria had been wearing during his motorcycle accident. She was praying to God to keep her safe. She knew her mother could not bear to lose another child. She had to stay alive.

“I remember that he turned right. The only way home in that area was the 232 road, and that’s the direction he chose. Right is north to Israel,” she explained. “Left is south toward Gaza.”

They found themselves in a traffic jam. “Why were we not moving? Someone told us: ‘You can’t pass! There’s a police checkpoint. They’ve blocked the road.’”

But it wasn’t Israeli policemen, Ms. Shmuel said. “It was a group of terrorists dressed up like our police. They were shooting at the first cars in line. Some were murdered instantly, some were shot while trying to escape. Anyone who tried to escape was shot.”

They turned around and Shimon drove as fast as he could. “When we saw Kibbutz Be’eri, I remember thinking it seemed like the safest place in the world, with its welcoming yellow gates and big homes to hide in.”

They called out from the car: “Please help us! SOS!”

“But no one came,” she said. “Baruch Hashem.” Thank God. Because 92 people were murdered at Be’eri, and 44 were taken hostage.

“Shimon turned the car around and we stopped at a second bomb shelter where 40 people stood, both inside and outside,” Ms. Shmuel said. “The feeling was different. There was a disgusting fear, as though we were all waiting for something terrible to happen, like the tick tick tick of a time bomb.

“Then my mom called. She asked me if I was at a party in Re’im. I told her I was far away from there and in a safe place with my friends. I told her not to watch the news of what happened at Kibbutz Be’eri or at the festival in Re’im. I didn’t want her to worry.”

Ms. Shmuel and Ms. Cohen heard gunshots. “Something was happening all around us,” she said. “Pew. Pew. Pew… People were screaming. ‘Get inside! It’s our army. They’re coming to save us!’ We all believed that it was our forces who were firing in our defense. Why wouldn’t we?

“Suddenly someone who was covered with blood and had sustained a gunshot to his shoulder came near us. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’

“The human mind could not understand what was happening around us. Our rational minds naturally turned to the message we grew up with — if there are rockets, go to a bomb shelter — but nothing about what was happening was rational.”

Calls to the police went unanswered. When Mayyan did reach someone, she was told: “‘We’re in an emergency situation — be strong and take care,’” Ms. Shmuel reported. “We stayed inside for 40 minutes. Everyone was calling their families to say ‘I love you’.

“Then someone got a call that the terrorists were going from bomb shelter to bomb shelter and throwing grenades. We texted Livnat to come get us, but she was terrified and felt she could not move. She reminded us that the army and the police would help us. She wrote: ‘I’m staying here, take care.’

“When we left the bomb shelter, we saw someone getting into his car. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Eff them.’ We asked him to let us know what was going on. When we didn’t hear from him, we got into Shimon’s car and called him. He said: ‘Drive like crazy and don’t look back.’

“Just three minutes after we left, the terrorists circled our bomb shelter. We saw them dragging bodies from their cars. Shimon drove so fast and furious, like an angel was guiding him. He put his head down and told us to do the same. Shira, Mayyan, and I drove with our heads down. We stopped at one point and asked a man which way to go. He said to put the directions to Beit Kama in Waze and drive the opposite way from home.

“But a car was blocking the road, their weapons pointed towards us. We couldn’t be sure if it was Israeli police or not, so we tried to zoom in with our phone cameras to see them. When we realized it was a white pickup truck with terrorists in it, Shimon turned around and drove faster than I’ve ever driven. It was like a never-ending horror movie.

“We drove in silence for four hours to Shimon’s home in Haifa.

We were two hours from home and we couldn’t ask Shimon to drive us.

“All of Israel was under attack. Cell connection was also faulty; we couldn’t get in touch with Livnat and Hadar.”

Eventually, Mayyan’s brother came to pick the girls up, and at 5 p.m. on October 7, Ms. Shmuel arrived home in Rishon LeZion. “I looked into my mother’s eyes and I didn’t need to say anything because she already knew everything.”

Ms. Shmuel didn’t think anything could be worse than what she and her friends had experienced during and after the festival, but the days following were “when the real nightmare began,” she said.

Across Israel, people posted the names and photos of missing family and friends. “We tried to find Livnat and Hadar in the videos posted from Gaza, trying to see if we could find them among those taken hostage, but with no luck,” Ms. Shmuel said. “After 10 days, the police and army let us know they recognized Hadar’s face and body, and then the next day, Livnat’s, in a bomb shelter where they’d taken cover.

“The terrorists had thrown grenades in all the bomb shelters, then made sure everyone was dead by shooting them. Everything was in chaos. The police or the army was responsible for returning people’s bodies to where they lived. First Hadar, then Livnat. Their funerals took place one after the other,” Ms. Shmuel said.

Ms. Shmuel’s friend Eynav, who drove with her husband, Or, to see the sunrise in Re’im, stopped in a bomb shelter when the missiles fell. Her mother, who was babysitting for their child, said that Eynav was killed in the shelter. Hamas took Or hostage.

“Shlomo, who had driven us from the crowded parking lot to the first bomb shelter, posted on a Facebook group for survivors of the Nova festival: ‘Hi guys, I drove three girls to a bomb shelter on October 7 and I am afraid to know if they are dead or alive,’” Ms. Shmuel said.

“I answered, ‘Shlomo, oh my God, it’s me.’

“He called me and told me that just after he’d dropped us off at the bomb shelter, he’d lit up a cigarette, and after just minutes of driving, he was followed by four cars that were constantly shooting. He got out of his car and ran. He finally hid in a bush in Sderot. ‘If you girls had stayed with me, we’d all be dead,’” she said. “We have stayed in touch with him, and we love him so much.”

Debbie, the policewoman who directed them out of the festival and helped so many people escape, was killed on October 7, Ms. Shmuel said. “We saw a post days later that she’d been murdered while directing people to safety. We were not successful keeping in touch with Shimon and his wife after he courageously drove us to Haifa.”

Ms. Shmuel looks back on what she’s experienced since October 7. “You don’t know what the right thing is to do,” she said. “You are making split-second decisions. Go right or go left. Stay in a bomb shelter or go outside to catch your breath. Get in a car with someone you don’t know or risk escaping on your own.

“Every decision we made on that day brought us here. My normal life stopped. All that was once important and interesting suddenly had no meaning. Everything seemed stupid and annoying.

“Life before October 7 did not exist anymore.”

She asks herself a basic question. “Why did God keep me alive?

Without an answer to that question, it was hard to go on with life. “Shira and I needed a reason to keep going,” she said. “We didn’t need a new beginning, but we needed a new life.”

They knew that they could stay home and grieve — or they could do something meaningful with their lives. “I am a lawyer who runs two e-commerce businesses,” Ms. Shmuel said. “Shira is the CEO of a travel agency. We’ve lived a life full of activity. What was God’s plan for us now?”

“There was a new fork in the road. We would start a nonprofit organization to rehabilitate other survivors. We would call it Beginning to Live Again. We would help those who were not able to or in a position to talk. We had strength that others didn’t have. We needed to do something with that energy, that power.”

Ms. Shmuel and Ms. Cohen decided to take a vacation in Miami to talk more about how they could make something good out of something bad. While they were there, they posted on Facebook saying that they’d like to tell their story. Ben Zion, the owner of a gallery called Time to Be Happy, invited them to speak. “We prepared for the talk in our hotel,” Ms. Shmuel said. “It was the first time we told the story of October 7 to each other. I told her what I remembered, and she told me what she remembered. It was powerful to bear witness to one another.

“Ben told us to ‘be your best,’ and we were,” she continued. “We ping-ponged off each other, sharing every detail of our story from beginning to end.”

From there, Ms. Cohen posted on a Facebook group in New York that she and Ms. Shmuel would like the chance to tell their story to the Israeli/Jewish community in the New York area. A producer, Hani Greidy of HG Productions, responded. “She took us in and set us up with some speaking engagements in New York and New Jersey,” Ms. Shmuel said. “Audience size ranged from 100 to over 1,000. The talks were so powerful. At every lecture, we got a response.

“Creating the nonprofit was God’s plan. It was the first stage of our healing.”

Since then, Ms. Shmuel and Ms. Cohen have spoken in many U.S. cities on the East and West coasts, and traveled throughout Europe and Israel to introduce Beginning to Live Again to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

“Our goal is to rehabilitate survivors on five-day retreats with the best therapists and professional coaches,” she said. “We want to help men and women find their voices again and live their dreams. Shira and I believe there is a reason for us to wake up in the morning. We didn’t choose for this to happen to us. We deserve to live a normal, good life.”

Many of Ms. Shmuel and Ms. Cohen’s friends who survived the massacre are not in the best shape. “They stay in bed until 4 p.m., they skip work, they don’t eat, their boyfriends can’t understand them anymore,” Ms. Shmuel said. “Mayyan has had a hard time. We’ve tried to help her, but it’s not easy. We’re doing our best.”

“People think that it’s about time — that the healing will take time — but grief and loss don’t have a time limit. Our feelings are our feelings. Sometimes I ask myself how I can be happy when my friends have died and my country is at war.

“I think it’s okay to have a range of feelings. When I fall down, my friends bring me back up.

Ms. Shmuel says that her friends now are October 7 survivors. “My friends from the past can’t understand my feelings,” she said.

She and Ms. Cohen hope to build a new community of people who know they can count on each other. That’s their new family.

“Her life now has a double meaning,” Ms. Shmuel said. “I could have gone to the sad and dark side after the attack. It would have been easy to do. But I choose to go toward the light and the hope. I want to help people heal.”

To donate to Beginning to Live Again fundraiser, go to secure.givelively.org/donate/the-giving-back-fund-inc/nova-community/shira-cohen-0

To learn more about the group on Instagram, go to www.instagram.com/beginning_to_live_again_nova/

To schedule a New Jersey or Rockland County talk with Ms. Cohen and Ms. Shmuel, email Hani Greidy at hanigreidy@gmail.com