“You can cry here,” the sign reads in pale blue lettering on a clean white background.
Beyond it, comfortable sofas piled with cushions are screened off from the rest of the room. It’s a safe, private corner where survivors of the Nova music festival can be with others who went through the same ordeal on 7 October, and get the mental health support many of them desperately need.
More than 360 young partygoers were shot, beaten or burnt to death by Hamas attackers, who stormed the festival site near the Israel-Gaza perimeter fence early that morning. Another 40 were taken hostage.
First, social media posts showed panicked crowds fleeing from rockets fired from Gaza and gunmen on the ground. Later, distressing videos from first responders began to confirm the scale of the massacre, as they filmed scores of murdered partygoers.
In the following days, Dr Lia Naor realised that – unlike those who’d been evacuated from their nearby kibbutzim – the young people from the festival who lived through the ordeal didn’t have a community already around them to give support.
So she built one.
“I just wanted them to be held,” Dr Naor explains.
“They were so fragmented and so frozen. Then there was the brokenness of faith that they that 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.”
The outdoor setting in Rishpon, north of Tel Aviv, is sheltered and peaceful. The early December days have been warm in Israel, and people sit on colourful beanbags scattered across the grass. A timetable is propped up showing the range of workshops that day, from mosaic making to sound baths. There’s massage, group music, and singing sessions.
