Two years after her son Slava was killed in the October 7 Hamas massacre, Yelena Giler ended her life on Thursday. Slava, a young man from Karmiel, was murdered at the Nova music festival. Since that day, her son Sasha said, she was unable to bear the pain.
Yelena had long struggled with mental health issues. “Until October 7, her condition was stable,” Sasha said. “She was taking her medication and living a normal routine. But October 7 completely broke her. Since Slava’s murder, she couldn’t bear the pain anymore. She reached a point where I didn’t recognize her. She really lost touch with reality.”
According to Sasha, his mother was hospitalized every two or three months. “She took his death very hard,” he said. “She was also evacuated from Kiryat Shmona, which didn’t make things easier for her.”
Sasha said he tried to help her. “I was with her the night before, and she seemed fine. The next morning she didn’t answer my calls until 11 a.m. I started worrying and called the police to check on her. They knocked on her door, but she didn’t respond. They called her phone and heard it ringing inside. When they went in, they found her dead on the couch.”
He described his mother as “a caring woman who was willing to do anything for her children," adding: “We were the most important thing in her life. She was full of love, but life didn’t treat her kindly. Despite everything she went through, she still gave us all she could, even in the last two years when things were so difficult.”
Just two days earlier, Roi Shalev, 30, the partner of Mapal Adam — who was murdered at the Nova festival and was the sister of TV host Maayan Adam — also took his own life. His father, Ronen, spoke with anguish about the families “shattered” since the October 7 massacre, the struggles his son faced, and the “happy, loving boy surrounded by friends” he once was.
Ronen said Roi’s mother had also died by suicide shortly after October 7 because of the trauma but was never officially recognized as a victim of terrorism. “There were 4,000 people at Nova,” Ronen said. “That’s 4,000 broken families, 4,000 survivors clinging to life somehow — with therapy, without therapy, with support or without it, but barely holding on.”
His goal now, he added, is “to push for the creation of a structured, professional system to specifically help the Nova families. I call them the Nova families because it’s something very broad — entire families, including the survivors, parents, and siblings who are all paying the price.”