At 9:24 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Samuel Daunov’s phone rang. It was his wife, Yulia. Or rather, it was her phone. A call placed by accident, most likely when the blast threw her body through the air.
“I know exactly what time she was killed,” Samuel says quietly. “Because her phone called me, and I heard the explosion.”
A minute later, he sent her a WhatsApp message. It never reached her.
For 10 days, he and his children lived in a nightmare of uncertainty before receiving official confirmation that Yulia Waxer Daunov – wife, mother of two, police officer, and the woman who had spent the morning trying to evacuate civilians from the Supernova music festival – had been killed.
She was 37 years old.
This year, Yulia’s story will be told at Masa Israel Journey’s International Yom HaZikaron Ceremony, the world’s largest English-language memorial ceremony dedicated to lone soldiers and victims of terror from the Diaspora. Her husband, Samuel, will recite “Kaddish” there – not only for Yulia but for a generation of lives cut short in the defense of Israel and of Jewish life.
But before Yulia became one of the names carried into national memory, she was something more intimate and irreplaceable: the center of her family’s life.
“She was the center of the home,” Samuel says. “She moved the family forward. Everything revolved around the children. They were the center of her life.”
A family built by aliyah
Yulia was born on July 27, 1986, in Ukraine, to Yelena and Alexander Waxer. In 1996, when she was nine and a half years old, her family immigrated to Israel together with her older sister, Victoria.
Their aliyah was not born out of desperation, Victoria says, but out of identity.
“We didn’t come because life was impossible in Ukraine,” she recalls. “There wasn’t some dramatic event. We came because we felt this was where we belonged. It was the natural next step in light of who we were as Jews.”
A teenager drawn to service
At 15, Yulia joined a youth patrol that worked alongside police and parents to help maintain order in Beersheba at night. She was hooked.
By the time her mandatory military service approached, she considered no other path.
She joined the police force in 2007 as part of her compulsory service and served in the Southern District. Afterward, she remained in the system, first as a civilian employee and later as a full police officer. In her final role, she served as head of the office of the Southern District operations branch’s chief of operations.
It was not merely a job, her family says. It was her worldview.
And yet, there was a profound irony at the heart of her service: Yulia was not naturally drawn to the field. In fact, she found blood, bodies, and scenes of injury overwhelming. She preferred command, coordination, order – the planning that made others safer.
The woman Samuel met at a club
Even as her career took shape, Yulia held tightly to another side of herself: the woman who loved music, dancing, beauty, and life.
She met Samuel at a club in Beersheba when she was 17 and he was 20. He had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a child, originally from the Caucasus region. Seven years later, they married.
“She cared a lot about how she looked,” he says with a smile one can almost hear. “She loved self-care, beauty, aesthetics. But at the same time, she was all about the children. She invested everything in them.”
Together, the couple built a life that was active, busy, and deeply rooted in family. They traveled around Israel. They raised their daughter, Shiral, now 14, and their son, Liron, now 11.
Yulia also built an impressive academic and professional life. She earned a bachelor’s degree in administration and public policy from Sapir College, and a master’s degree in business administration from the Peres Academic Center.
“She was always moving forward,” Samuel says. “Always thinking, always planning, always holding everything together.”
Her ‘last shift’
On Oct. 7, Yulia was not supposed to be at the Nova Music Festival.
Like many police officers, she sometimes took on paid overtime shifts securing parties and events. For a long time, she had enjoyed working at outdoor festivals. But by early October, she had decided she was done with that part of the job.
“She told herself this would be the last one,” Samuel says. “She wanted weekends back. She wanted time with the children. She had actually found someone to replace her,” he recounts.
Then the festival’s permit was temporarily canceled. The replacement made other plans. The permit was reinstated. And Yulia, not wanting to leave anyone stranded, decided she would do the shift after all.
It would be her last.
She worked the night shift at what was known as the “little bar.” By dawn, her shift had ended, and she was already on her way to the car. But then she turned back.
“She felt the morning team hadn’t really gotten a proper handover,” Samuel says. “So she went back to go over procedures again.”
That decision may have cost her life. It almost certainly saved others.
‘Mom, I have more than 2,000 people to get out of here’
As rockets began to fall and the Hamas attack unfolded, Yulia moved instantly into crisis mode.
In the last voice message she sent her mother, in Russian, she said: “Mom, I have more than 2,000 people to get out of here.”
That was the last her family ever heard directly from her.
According to testimony from the police chain of command, Yulia was the first to alert her commander, Supt. Amir Klein, to the scale of the massacre. At 7:40 a.m., she sent a message reporting large numbers of gunshot victims. Under constant fire, she continued to send updates, photos, and real-time locations that helped direct responding forces.
Thanks to Yulia’s reports, her superiors began to understand not just that there was an attack but the scale of the attack and the number of terrorists involved.
At 8:28 a.m., she made contact with the commander of a force on its way to the area and sent him her location. Around half an hour later, she sent her commander a message that now reads like both prayer and premonition: “Pray for me.”
Her final conversation with him took place at 9:14 a.m.
Samuel was messaging with her throughout the morning.
“She started evacuating people who had been sleeping there,” he says. “People who were in the middle of a party, exhausted, hungover, confused – people who needed to get out. It took a long time to get them moving.”
The police communications system had partially collapsed. Roads were under attack. The terrorists were everywhere.
At one point, Yulia reached the police command post near the access road to the festival. It was already crowded with civilians and partygoers who had fled there for safety. Then the terrorists reached that area too, and everyone was told to run.
Yulia and a group of civilians ran toward an ambulance about 50 meters away.
The ambulance was hit by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade).
Eighteen people were killed. Two young women survived.
“Yulia was found about 30 meters from the ambulance,” Samuel says. “Apparently, the blast threw her.”
Learning to live after
In the months since, Samuel has become what he never expected to be: a full-time father.
“I changed a lot,” he says. “I really got to know my children in a way that didn’t happen before, because I worked all my life.”
There is guilt in that realization, he admits.
“It sits on my conscience. Why did it have to come to this for me to make room to raise my children? Why was I focused only on work?”
And in that, too, Yulia remains present.
“She always told me, ‘It’s not all about money. Family is the most important thing.’”
He speaks to her often. He visits her grave two or three times a week. He writes to her. He tries to ask himself, in every family decision, what she would have done.
“We talk about Mom all the time,” he says of the children. “We keep her memory alive, and that strengthens us.”
Her story on Remembrance Day
At Masa’s International Yom HaZikaron Ceremony, Yulia’s story will be part of a wider act of remembrance – one that binds Israel to Jewish communities around the world.
Held annually in Latrun and broadcast to Jewish audiences in some 60 countries, the ceremony honors fallen soldiers, immigrants, lone soldiers, victims of terror, tourists, and civilians from the Diaspora whose lives were taken in service to Israel or because they were Jews.
This year, Samuel will recite “Kaddish.”
It is hard to imagine a more painful role. But it is also one that reflects the meaning of the ceremony itself: that no life lost in defense of the Jewish people belongs only to one family. It belongs, in some way, to all of us.
And that is especially true of Yulia.
She was an immigrant child who grew into an Israeli public servant. A woman who had chosen a life of order and protection. A mother who should have gone home when her shift ended but turned back because something had not yet been done.
In the most chaotic and brutal moment, she became exactly what her country needed: A fighter. A protector. A hero.
And, still, to those who loved her most, something even more precious than that.
“She was a family person above everything,” Samuel says. “That’s how I want people to remember her.”
This article was written in cooperation with Masa Israel Journey.