From the Parents of Gili Adar

Hamas murdered our daughter. This is what she’d tell American Jews right now.

By: Orna and Eldad Adar
September 13, 2024
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Eleven months ago, Hamas murdered our daughter while she was dancing and celebrating life at a music festival in Re’im, Israel.

At 6:50 a.m. on Oct. 7, Gili messaged us that something was going on. She told us not to worry. More texts. Gunshots. She was hiding, warning friends to stay away from the area. At 9:14, she wrote: “Until now I wasn’t afraid. Now I’m scared.” By 9:35, we later learned, the terrorists found her. Within five minutes, they murdered Gili and nearly 30 other young people at point-blank range — a fraction of the 364 people who were killed at the festival.

The brutality with which Hamas murdered our Good Life Gili, our radiant, wonderful girl, at just 24 years old, echoes the evil of the recent execution of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi and Almog Sarusi. Five of these six beautiful souls were at the Nova music festival, like Gili. All of their families are processing the worst news of their lives.

It’s the news we received three days after Gili’s last message, after we frantically headed south to find her, after we pleaded on Facebook for more information — “OUR GILI IS STILL MISSING” — after each passing hour drained the possibility that she would stumble through the front door and into our arms.

We spoke at Gili’s eulogy, like the hostages’ families did at theirs. And yet there were no words. There are no words. When we now watch videos of Gili, sometimes we laugh and sometimes we cry and most times our joy and our grief are not oil and water, they do not separate, but blend into a new, strange taste of life.

As Gili would say: “Why one or the other when you can have both?”

Gili, for whom 24 hours in a day was never enough, took so many roles. An adventurer, she worked three jobs to save money for the dream trip she took to South America. A listener, Gili sat for hours at a time with each of the lone soldiers — those without family in Israel — which whom she worked in the Israeli army.

After Gili’s death, we have found new roles ourselves.

We are gardeners, tending to the flowers on her grave and watering the seeds of her memory.

We are archivists, collecting thousands of photos and videos of our daughter; compiling hundreds, often unsolicited testimonials about the ways she shaped people’s lives.

We are messengers, talking about Gili with whomever will listen: Gili, with a conquering smile and an infectious laugh, “Guppy” to her campers, who took the coffee kit in her backpack to the mountains, the desert, the sea, who gave her heart to everyone from children with special needs to the store cashier.

More than anything, we miss Gili. The faint thrum of our constant grief can balloon in pitch and intensity when we least expect it. Waiting at a traffic light. Or at the supermarket, where our tears condense like the dew on the carton of milk we just removed from the refrigerator. When we’re awake or asleep, in every activity and every moment, we miss our girl. There is no life after Gili. Our only path into the future is with Gili.

And so we share Gili with others. They share her with us. We find her in unexpected places — the group of girls who got a common tattoo in her honor; the memories of a stranger she met on a Colombian beach. And we make pilgrimages to the places she loved the most, which brought us 6,000 miles over the ocean this summer to the United States to visit summer two camps, Tel Yehudah and Ben Frankel, that Gili called home.