During the holiday of Sukkot, on the weekend of October 6-7, 2023, thousands of young Israelis and foreign nationals attended a music festival at Kibbutz Re’im in Southern Israel. The Supernova festival, known as ‘Nova’, expressed the values of “free love and spirit, environmental preservation, and appreciation of rare natural values that the festival embodies.” At 6:30 am on October 7, 2023, festival goers at Nova were attacked by Hamas; hundreds of people were chased, murdered, and taken hostage by Hamas. The final figure communicated by police on November 17, 2023 was 364 dead, including 17 police officers, and 40 young people were abducted from the festival. Human dignity, valuing life and honoring the right of all humans to live free, was denied to countless Nova festival goers on October 7th. While there may be little that we can physically do, from thousands of miles away, to console those who lost family members and friends or who have family members or friends being held in captivity, there are small things that we can do to show care, compassion, and keep the names of those in captivity alive. In this activity, we try to connect students with the hostages, by creating kandi bracelets with their names.
