The old saying goes that lightning doesn’t strike twice, right?
Amit Musaei, an Israeli tour guide and psytrance music aficionado who barely escaped from the murderous spree at the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7, might beg to differ.
In the war with Iran, the toll on the tour guide’s Holon neighborhood was massive. Overcome by a ballistic missile barrage, six apartment buildings were obliterated, hundreds of families were displaced, his kids’ school was destroyed, and his home, 300 meters from the epicenter, although livable, was damaged.
It’s no wonder that post-traumatic stress disorder figures prominently in the way Musaei crafts his highly sought-after Gaza envelope tours, through recollections of love, loss, war triggers – and a surprising flair for humor.
Joining Musaei’s tour, the Magazine retraced the events of Oct. 7 in an immersive full-day excursion. Billed as a Gaza border tour with a Nova survivor, this gifted and well-researched storyteller recounts the historical conflict of the region, along with an honest reckoning of his ordeal since Oct. 7, when Musaei’s PTSD led to severe depression.
And yet, this tour is anything but depressing. With his quick wit, Musaei begins by explaining to English-speaking participants what his name, Amit, actually means. “It means friend, and it’s therefore my obligation to be a friend till the end of the day. Then you can unfriend me,” he says with a chuckle.
“The idea is to make the tour atmosphere light because people know they are coming to something deep,” the guide says, acknowledging this foremost concern on passengers’ minds.
Musaei lets it be known from the get-go that his best friend from childhood, Adir Tamam, and his wife, Shiraz, were brutally murdered roadside on their way to the Nova music festival. The couple was shot to death by Hamas terrorists after taking refuge in a bomb shelter minutes away from the Nova venue.
“Adir and Shiraz were my neighbors, the closest friends I saw every day,” Musaei recalls.
The friends had coordinated the purchase of tickets months ahead of time, as they often did in anticipation of the peacefully escapist trance music festivals, which they loved attending together. Adir and Shiraz, the parents of two young children who were sleeping at home with one of their savtas, left for the Supernova festival in time to see the rising sun, a highlight of the event.
“In the days following Oct. 7, I was waiting to know what happened to Adir and Shiraz. They had taken refuge in a bomb shelter between the Be’eri and Re’im kibbutzim. How do you explain to your children that your best friends’ parents will never come home? Their bodies weren’t identified in the early days, and without confirmation, the story wasn’t real. I felt I needed to speak to the media. I volunteered to speak only to the international news outlets and only in English,” Musaei tells the Magazine.
After a month, Musaei said he had had enough of those interviews and sank into a depression.
“Three of my surviving friends who had been with me at the Nova musical festival, Osher Sukar, Alon Milner, and Alon Kazar, had to convince me to leave home after being inside for almost four weeks. Except for going to my friends’ shiva and the funerals, I didn’t go out. My daughters were panicked by this entire thing. They never learned the story, but they lost the parents of their best friends, so this has affected them massively.”
Tourism had fallen apart after Oct. 7, but Jews from the Diaspora and non-Jewish Zionists were coming to Israel to show solidarity and bear witness to the devastation. They were the new tourists, Musaei notes, but he felt he was in no condition to lead them back to the scenes of his living nightmare.
Following the psychologist’s advice
A psychologist eventually encouraged Musaei to speak about his experience from the safety of his home by giving virtual tours. Through Google locations, he managed to retrieve every step he made and created a tour to share on Zoom. In December 2023, people started to invite Musaei to speak to their groups of volunteers organized by synagogues, Jewish mission groups, and Christian Zionists.
By April 2024, he felt resilient enough to give the tours on location.
“The loud sounds, explosions, and interceptions, which were especially triggering, were no longer affecting my mental stability. I began leading tours to the sites of my trauma and teaching the conflict’s history, so that people could gain an understanding of the Gaza envelope area and the challenges of these communities since Oct. 7.”
Mission groups, especially in the early months of the war, would report back to their communities the facts on the ground and follow up by providing financial, material, and logistical support. Musaei saw that these talks were helping the war effort.
“People asked me from the beginning, Does it hurt you to do the tours?” Musaei tells the Magazine in a candid follow-up interview. “Yes, but it’s 80% therapeutic, and 20% takes me back to the trauma. We are a nation of storytellers. It’s not a biblical story per se, but it’s Jewish history. I’m not a religious person, but I’m very traditional and I care about the history of my nation.”
To relive these moments, how does a Nova survivor do it? Not just once, but several times each week. Musaei explains that he still attends monthly support meetings organized by the Tribe of Nova Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by and for festival survivors and their bereaved family members. While taking a walk on a beach with Doron Feler, a swimming teacher, lifeguard, mutual friend, and neighbor of Adir and Shiraz, they discussed a shared passion for the water. Adir and Shiraz had been swim instructors for babies and groups with special needs.
The two came up with a project to commemorate the memories of their friends Adir and Shiraz, both dedicated to using water as a therapeutic tool. And this is how Swim Forever began, under the umbrella of the Tribe of Nova Foundation.
Through Swim Forever, Nova festival survivors and bereaved families receive swimming and water therapy in groups of up to 20 participants. “The foundation gave the green light, and I found the person who could support Swim Forever financially, an amazing lady, Ana Scherer, who had participated in one of my tours. She has a swimming gear company in Brazil and was willing to cover the majority of the costs. This complements a range of therapeutic services already offered by the foundation, including occupational therapy, yoga, dance, and a basketball team.
Feler is the water therapy and swimming instructor, leading the Swim Forever program from a pool in Ramat Gan. Musaei is now working with the Tribe of Nova to raise funds to build the foundation its own gym and swimming pool.
“When I’m meeting with Nova music festival survivors, about once a month, I’m hoping to inspire other survivors, who are better or worse than me, trying to convince them that by creating for our own, we can move forward,” Musaei says.
To tour the hard-hit Eshkol region with Musaei brings some much-needed closure to his participants, too. One woman on the tour had signed up just before returning to the US and puts it this way: “I was so anxious to come that I had a sleepless night. But I’m glad I did the tour. I feel connected to the suffering in ways that make it real, and I want to come back and volunteer next time.”
A Tour Guide’s Life-saving Advantage
“I had the advantage of knowing the Nova site because I used to come here to see the beautiful red anemone flowers that bloom here late winter and early spring,” the guide explains.
Chabad youth have set up a table for men to wrap tefillin just before entering the heartbreaking site, where row after row of murdered faces are affixed to poles. Each memorial is adorned at the base with handmade ceramic red anemones. Photographs show smiling and serious faces of every festival-goer, vendor, security personnel, and festival staff member murdered that day. This includes 344 civilians and 34 security personnel murdered, 44 taken hostage, and an unreported number wounded by violent and sexual assault.
The memorial location for Adir and Shiraz, and their friend Celine, murdered with them in the bomb shelter, is on Musaei’s itinerary every time he brings tours here. It’s his much-needed time to pay his respects and tell heartbreaking stories that connect tour participants to his personal loss. Afterwards, Musaei allots about an hour of free time to move around the memorial site and get to know the victims through the love letters, inspiring tributes, photographs, and personal belongings that accompany each portrait.
The trip could have ended here, emotionally speaking. But there’s one more stop that Musaei wants us to see. A short drive away, the minibus makes a brief stop by a chain-link fence. Here is the parting shot of a day in the Gaza envelope: what looks like a massive dump for burnt-out vehicles. The scope of monstrous evil stretches as far as the eye can see, hard evidence that Hamas’s murdering spree was calculated not only to set fire to cars, but with the passengers still inside. Thousands upon thousands of rusted metal carcasses have come to rest here, barely recognizable as the cars, trucks, and vans they once were.
Musaei could have ended here if this tour was about bearing witness, but throughout the day, the guide wants to introduce a family of great heroes who started Shuva Ahim, a rest area for soldiers. Upbeat music welcomes a steady flow of soldiers and volunteers. Shuva Ahim is stocked like an old-fashioned dry goods store, a place to recharge and resupply with daily necessities and a relaxed, post-Nova love vibe in the air. A rustic wood cottage attached to an expansive deck with benches and tables gives soldiers a place to enjoy aromatic, freshly cooked hot meals and endless cups of coffee.
Everything is free for soldiers here. Started by three brothers, Kobi, Eliran, and Dror Trabelsi, they started after Oct. 7 by setting up a small table beside a bush along Shuva junction. They gave away bottles of water and whatever else they could rustle up for IDF personnel and soldiers who were heading into and out of Gaza.
Today, the Trabelsi brothers’ nonprofit enterprise serves more than a thousand freshly cooked meals per day with the support of donors and volunteer cooks, who come from all over Israel and from overseas to help out.
“There’s zero bureaucracy here,” Dror Trabelsi tells the Magazine. “In the army, you need to sign with five different people to get something, because everyone is under someone’s command. If someone in the IDF comes and tells me that his guys have a chance to take showers and that they need 40 towels, I’ll get the 40 towels. If I don’t have it, I’ll try to figure it out. I’ll call some people.”
Shuva Ahim is 3 km. from the border, which is, admittedly, unnerving. But as the last rays of the sun set in the hard-hit Gaza envelope region of the northern Negev, Musaei has put the inner wimp to rest.
Amit Musaei brings his talk about the Gaza envelope to Diaspora communities as far-flung as Golders Green in London, to synagogues in Brooklyn, and in Toronto as part of a Nova festival memorial exhibition. For inquiries and bookings about Musaei’s on-site presentations and Gaza envelope tours, he can be contacted at:
www.amazingjerusalem.com/trip/gaza-border-tour-to-sderot-and-nova-music-festival/
www.tribeofnova.com/
Follow and contact Shuva Ahim here: www.instagram.com/shuva_ahim/?hl=en
The writer is a pioneering intuitive artist based in Haifa, and has written about the twists and turns of her life in Japan in a memoir: The Wagamama Bride: A Jewish Family Saga Made in Japan.