When singer-songwriter Yoshi first saw the video from Sgt. Gadi Cotal’s funeral, he did not immediately understand what he was looking at. What reached him first was not the image, but the voice.
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“At first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing,” he said. “I only heard an angel-like voice singing my song.” Then he looked closer. He saw the grave, the flowers, and the setting. “I understood the sad truth,” he said. It was, at once, “very, very sad,” but also “an honor” to realize that one of his songs had become part of the emotional landscape of a young soldier’s story.
That song was "Ten Ziman" ("Give Me a Sign”). Gadi Cotal, a tank fighter from Kibbutz Afikim, near the Sea of Galilee, was killed in northern Gaza on September 8, 2025, just one week after turning 20. He served in Battalion 52 of the 401st Armored Brigade and was posthumously promoted to sergeant. Friends remember him as someone who was always mentoring others, volunteering, and deeply connected to music.
At the funeral, Gadi’s best friend Ran sang Yoshi’s song. The clip spread quickly, passed from one person to another in the small, dense web of Israeli social and digital life, until it reached the artist himself. What happened next has become, for Gadi’s family, part of the story of how music came to be a presence in their mourning.
“It wasn’t a decision,” Yoshi said of what followed. “Two minutes after I saw the video, I told a friend, ‘Find out where they are sitting shiva (the Jewish mourning period). I’m coming.’ It was an urge.”
Andrea Ben Hamo-Cotal, Gadi’s mother, remembers the moment with unusual clarity. Yoshi did not send condolences through a manager or a message through someone else. He arrived at the family’s shiva with a guitar and stayed for hours, singing with Gadi’s friends. “He didn’t call. He didn’t ask. He just came,” she said. Later, reflecting on the visit, she put it more bluntly: “There are artists who come, sing one song, take a photo, and leave. He stayed.”
What gives that story its force is not celebrity generosity alone. Yoshi is not an unknown singer who happened to drift into the room. He is already a recognizable figure in Israeli music, and his latest album, Moadon (Club), was written during the war and shaped by themes of family, home, and conflict. But the meaning of the gesture lies precisely in the way he stepped out of the structure of performance. He did not come to deliver a set, but to sit alongside people who were grieving.
For him, the feeling was immediate. “I felt that I was part of them,” he said. “We were not strangers. We were part of the same story.”
That phrase, “part of the same story,” points to something larger than the bond between one family and one artist. It goes to the heart of the role music plays in Israel, especially on Memorial Day. In many countries, commemorative music exists alongside official ceremonies. In Israel, songs often help define the ceremony itself. They shape its emotional vocabulary, and over time, they come to hold memories that are both deeply personal and unmistakably collective.
Dr. Ayelet Dassa, a music therapist and researcher at Bar-Ilan University, said that this begins with a basic psychological function. “People need someone to resonate with what they feel,” she said. “Songs help them not feel alone.”
That helps explain why Israel’s Memorial Day is so associated with music, and why the music chosen for it is rarely consoling in a conventional sense. Radio stations shift into memorial programming. Ceremonies return to the same repertoire. Families hear the same melodies year after year. The songs do not try to interrupt grief, but meet it where it already is.
“People listen to sad songs when they are sad because they need something that resonates with what they feel,” Dassa said. When those songs are heard not individually but together, she added, they acquire an additional function. “When we all listen to the same songs, it helps us come together as a collective.”
Loss rarely private in Israel
That collective element matters in Israel because loss is rarely only private. Even families mourning a single person do so within a national setting that immediately places personal grief inside a larger story of war, service, and memory. Music becomes one of the few forms capable of remaining intimate while also being communal.
Dassa argues that the power of these songs lies not only in their melodies or lyrics, but in what accumulates around them. “It’s not just the song,” she said. “It’s the story connected to it.” A song sung at a funeral becomes tied to that funeral. A melody heard on a particular day of loss is never fully detached from it afterward. Over time, these layers build, which is one reason some Israeli songs become almost inseparable from national remembrance, even if they were not originally written for that purpose.
That is where repetition becomes important. “We learn that these songs are connected to this day,” Dassa said. “Repetition makes a difference.” In practice, this means that by the time Memorial Day arrives, many Israelis already know how certain songs will affect them. A melody begins, and before the words even settle, the emotional frame is already in place.
Yoshi has seen this mechanism up close, especially in the aftermath of October 7 and the war that followed. In the last two and a half years, he said, he has traveled through cemeteries, memorial gatherings, hostage events, shelters, and performances for communities living through trauma. He has come to believe that music in Israel is not a luxury layered atop life. It is woven into life itself.
“In the darkest moments, people crave music,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. It’s like water. People here don’t just listen to songs. They live with songs.”
That observation aligns with Dassa’s research in another area: memory and cognitive decline. In her work with people living with dementia, she has found that songs can remain available even when other forms of recall weaken. “Songs can open a window to the past,” she said. “It’s not just personal memory. It’s collective memory.” In other words, music can preserve access not only to what a person felt, but to who they were and the world they belonged to when they first knew that song.
Song returns in different setting after Gadi's death
Seen through that lens, what happened around Gadi’s memory takes on broader significance. Andrea’s story begins not with death, but with a teenage son insisting that his mother come to a Yoshi concert. She barely knew the songs then, she said, but found herself crying anyway. Months later, after Gadi was killed, one of those songs returned in a radically different setting. It was no longer just something he liked. It became part of the way he would be remembered.
Yoshi now speaks about that shift with the clarity of someone who has had to relearn his own place in relation to his songs. “The moment I release a song, it’s not mine anymore,” he said. “It belongs to the people just as much as it belongs to me.”
For artists, that idea can sound abstract until a song reappears in someone else’s life at the exact moment it is most needed. Yoshi said he first learned this from older Israeli musicians he admired as a teenager, artists who told him that once a song is released, it is no longer the writer’s sole possession. He did not fully believe them until he began releasing his own music. Now, he said, people constantly teach him things about his own songs that he did not know when he wrote them. Their experiences expand the original intent.
That expansion is also evident in how his recent music has been received more broadly. Speaking about another song he wrote days after October 7, Yoshi said it emerged from something intensely personal, a raw desire to get life back, to get people back, to recover what had been broken. Yet the song quickly took on a larger public meaning. “I wrote it from something very personal,” he said. “But in a second, it became everyone’s story.”
For Dassa, that kind of movement from the individual to the collective is not incidental, but central to how music functions in Israel. Songs written around one moment can later be “recruited,” in her description, into another. They become attached to a new national episode because they hear in it something that already belongs to the place's emotional grammar. Even listeners who do not fully understand every lyric can still be moved by a song if they know the story around it.
That is also why Yoshi’s decision to dedicate his latest album, Club, to Gadi matters beyond symbolism. It was not merely a private gesture toward a bereaved family, but a placement of Gadi’s name inside a public artistic object that will circulate beyond the moment where they first met in grief. Yoshi described it as a way of putting memory into something lasting.
“If I can put Gadi’s name together with my music, in something that will remain, then it becomes an act of memory,” he said. “Maybe it’s small, but for me it’s very significant.”
In practical terms, that means a soldier from Afikim who loved a song will now remain linked, for anyone who encounters the album, to the artist he followed. In cultural terms, it shows how music in Israel often becomes one of the places where the dead continue to live publicly. Not in abstraction, and not only in official memorial forms, but in songs, dedications, performances, and stories repeated from one person to another.
What emerges from the combined accounts of Yoshi, Andrea, and Dassa is not a sentimental claim that music heals everything. Music does not erase grief, but gives it a form people can enter together. It lets a family hear that they are not alone in what they are carrying. It lets a country revisit loss through a shared language, even when words fail.
That may be why, on Remembrance Day, Israeli memory is so often heard before it is explained. A song begins. People recognize it. And with it comes not only the melody, but the weight of all the names, rooms, funerals, ceremonies, friendships, and absences that have already attached themselves to it.
In that sense, Andrea Ben Hamo-Cotal’s memory of the shiva and Yoshi’s description of his impulse to go there are not side stories to the larger national day. Rather, they are the larger story reduced to a human scale. A mother remembers that a singer stayed. The singer remembers feeling an urge, not a decision. A researcher explains why such moments matter.
Together, they illuminate something essential about Israeli remembrance: on a day devoted to those who are gone, songs are often where memory keeps speaking.