The survivors often walk through the hillside garden breathing in the aromas wafting from the citrus trees and rows of bushy herbs, picking leaves from the bushes to brew into tea.
Two months after Hamas-led terrorists burst through Israel’s border with Gaza and killed 360 young people attending an overnight rave in a vast meadow, survivors of the nightmare attack gather daily on the edge of Rishpon, a town north of Tel Aviv, seeking a measure of calm in a therapy camp where they can learn to live with their ghastly memories, the BBC reports.
“Even though their bodies were whole, we saw how broken they were and that their eyes were hollow,” Dr. Lia Naor, a therapist specializing in nature-based ecotherapy, told the BBC.
“They didn’t look alive. They couldn’t look at us. They would shake, they couldn’t eat, they couldn’t drink. The evil that these people met is incomprehensible.
“I told them early on, ‘As dark the darkness is that you saw, we’re going to bring the light. We’re going to help you believe in yourselves and in others again,’” Naor said.
The effort is entirely private, staffed by volunteers like Naor and Dr. Itamar Cohen, who was working in London on Oct. 7 and rushed back as soon as he could find a flight.
Two horrifying images from the massacre at a music festival in Southern Israel on Saturday: An unidentified woman running from the attack on the Supernova festival (left). A woman identified as Noa Argamani being taken on motorbike by Hamas terrorists (right).Inteldoge/X, Yediotnews/Telegram
Naor explained that unlike those who’d been evacuated from their nearby kibbutzes, the young people who’d survived the music festival massacre didn’t have a community already around them to give support. So she built one.
“I just wanted them to be held,” said Naor. “They were so fragmented and so frozen. Then there was the brokenness of faith that they had felt–there’d been nobody there for them, not their parents, not the army, not the police. Nobody was there to save them. So the first thing was just getting them to feel secure and in a healing space.”
Each day, professional clinical psychologists mix with the survivors who arrive. They’re there to talk as much or as little as needed.
“People here have seen a tremendous amount of pain. Some of them were extremely close to not being here anymore,” said Cohen. “Some were chased and had to run for their lives. There wasn’t much time to process that, just running away from a massacre. And now they still need to function, and they still need to go and push through.”
Lior Gellbaum, a 24-year-old survivor of the festival massacre has been coming daily to the therapy garden.
“Everyone that was at the Nova festival, we love to dance, we love to be together. After the massacre happened, it was important for the community to get back together and to strengthen each other, to be with each other and talk and feel our emotions.”
She is hoping that her daily visits will help her heal. “It’s been hard for me to listen to music since the Nova festival,” she said. “Still I only feel comfortable listening to music at concerts with the artists that come to this place.”
By Christine McGrath/ Stony Brook News When Drs. Rachel Bergeson and Brian Margolis became friends with new neighbors Katherine and Bob Bayer, they had no idea they would participate in a tradition spanning 40 years. Rachel and Brian began attending frequent in-house recitals in the Bayers’ home in St. James, where Stony Brook Department of Music graduate students put their talents on display. The Bayers’ special showcase of Stony Brook talent eventually inspired Drs. Bergeson and Margolis to recognize the […]
