Two Years After Oct. 7: From Trauma to Resilience, Israel’s Road to Recovery Through the Eyes of a Nova Survivor
- Jenna Romano
- Oct 3
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 7
At 6:30 a.m. on October 7th, 2023, the music stopped at the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, southern Israel. What began as a celebration of life — with thousands of people of all ages and nationalities emerging from their campsites to dance at the sunrise (a time that every festival-goer will describe as almost ‘sacred’) — transformed in just moments. Today, it’s known as the Nova Music Festival Massacre, indelible as one of the most chilling events during the horrific October 7th attack, and one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Israel’s history.
Among the 4,000 partygoers was Roey Dery from Be’er Sheva, whom the Mideast Journal had a chance to chat with and hear his chilling first-hand experience.
“At 6:30 exactly, the music stopped, and at the beginning, I didn’t understand what was happening,” describes Dery. “Sometimes what can happen at nature parties is police breaking up or stopping a party. But this party was approved, everything was by the book, so I didn’t understand why they stopped the music, or why people were shouting.”
Roey, 25 at the time, and his brother went to the festival with eight of their close friends from Be’er Sheva. Within hours, three of that young group would be dead. The chaos of that morning—gunfire, running frantically, confusion, the desperate search for safety—would mark the beginning of a national trauma that continues to reverberate through Israeli society two years after October 7th.
“When we came home [after fleeing the massacre], I was at the entrance to my house with my brother and we were trying to understand what we just went through,” Dery says. “I remember the moment my father saw us, and he said, ‘I want you to know that you just came out of hell, you need to say from now on, thank you for being alive, every day.”
The Jewish state confronts unprecedented trauma
If one could describe Israeli society nearly two years after October 7th, it would be anything but how a “normal” society functions. The nation is marked by incredible strength and resilience, while simultaneously, the fatigue of war and political divide has left citizens frustrated, angry and traumatized.
The mental health impact has been staggering. According to a State Comptroller’s report from April 2024, approximately 3 million Israeli adults experienced anxiety, depression or PTSD symptoms in the six months following the attacks. Among them, around 580,000 Israelis suffered severe PTSD-level symptoms directly due to the October 7th events. Perhaps most striking is research showing that 23% of the Israeli Jewish population who were not directly exposed to the attack—nearly one quarter of the country’s Jewish population—are suffering from PTSD. This phenomenon of secondary trauma speaks to the collective wound the nation has endured.
“With every death of a soldier, every recovery of a hostage, every announcement of a hostage body being found—citizens of Israel are confronted with almost non-stop tragedy and devastation on a weekly basis,” notes one observer of the national mood.
The trauma manifests in multiple ways. Immediate proximity to traumatic events significantly increases the risk of PTSD. Still, many Israelis are also dealing with forced displacement, financial burdens (from loss of jobs or income), and what mental health experts call “moral injury”—experiencing betrayal by leaders or institutions that can lead to depression and anxiety.
Common PTSD symptoms—trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, nightmares, avoidance behaviors—have become part of daily life for hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Yet what makes this trauma particularly difficult to process is the lack of closure. The war continues, not all hostages have returned from Gaza, and there has yet to be an accepted, comprehensive ceasefire deal.
“There’s no ability to move on because of the enormity of the event. We’re not at closure. We’re still managing the trauma…we’re still in trauma,” explains mental health expert Professor Jonathan Huppert, Head of the Center for Trauma Recovery at Hebrew University’s Department of Psychology.
Nova survivors: Unprecedented numbers
Of the 4,000 partygoers at the Nova festival, 378 men and women were murdered, hundreds were injured, and 44 were kidnapped to Gaza. The survivors face a unique and severe form of trauma—a celebration turned, nearly instantly, into terror.
The statistics are sobering: two-thirds of Nova survivors are reported to suffer from PTSD. According to Roee Admon, a neuropsychologist and trauma expert at the University of Haifa, these numbers are unprecedented in the world of trauma research.
“In cases of mass terrorist events, the numbers reach around 15% with PTSD,” Admon noted in a study. “But in Nova, we are talking about more than four times, with 65% in very significant distress. There are unprecedented numbers in the world of trauma.”
Survivor Roey Dery describes the incredible and tragic dissonance at the festival when he recalls the moments just after the attack started. As he heartbreakingly retells the story of the moments he and his friends decided to pack up their camp, he says how one friend tried to offer comic relief by filming the group, and asking each one if they had “any last words,”—a chilling memory that’s now loaded with tragic irony, of course.
“We told all of our friends goodbye, shaked their hands and gave them a hug, and we started driving, and I was sure that they were right behind us. And a few minutes later, we were at the end of the exit of the parking area, and we could already understand the chaos.” Dery explains. “You can see that something is happening. This was chaos. I have not other way to describe it because from one side, you see people panicking, and on the other side, you still see people in the wrong world, people at the same time with music playing, dancing outside of their cars.”
For Roey and his friends, the morning unfolded in surreal horror. When he and his friends decided to flee the site of the festival, they split into two cars. In Roey’s car, they drove off-road through fields, pulled a stranger into their car as she ran towards them banging on the windows, and navigated past abandoned vehicles as gunfire erupted around them.
“We continued driving forward, and I was speaking to my friend Sean [Davitashvili], who was in the other car, through messages. He was still in the area of the festival and said he was being shot at. I told him everything will be fine, it will be over in a moment—because that’s what I know about Israel and the military here.” Roey recalls. “Now I feel I was practically lying to him, because that wasn’t this sort of situation.”
Roey described what it was like as his car continued their escape. “We were trying to understand where we were on the map, and we were on the phone with my father, who told us to get to a nearby Kibbutz,” he says. “But like ten seconds after he told us this, he said, ‘Listen, don’t stay anywhere near the area, drive forward towards a road that can bring you to Be’er Sheva.’” Roey’s father continued to be a guiding light for the group as they drove, “He told us to drive East, to drive as far away from Gaza as you can. He told us to follow the rising sun…and that’s what we did.”
The immediate terror was only the beginning. The hours, days and weeks that followed brought a different kind of anguish. While Roey maintained contact with their second group of friends, who were in a different car, for a while after, eventually, Roey’s calls and messages were met with silence.
“The last message my friend Sean sent was telling me that he’s afraid, and that he wasn’t sure what to do. Sean was in the car with our friends —and we couldn’t contact them for the rest of the day. When we got to Be’er Sheva, they didn’t answer our messages.”
Roey recalls how it felt like a race against time to find them, to know what happened to their friends. “The only thing we would do is go on Telegram and watch every video to try and find them,” he says. “I watched every video. Everything. All the videos, all the blood, there is no video I didn’t see from the 7th of October because the only information we could get was from Telegram—we were praying to learn that they got kidnapped, because at least then, they would still be alive.”
One by one, Roey learned the fate of his friends as their families received phone calls from the military and began to identify their bodies. Sean Davitashvili, Lior Tkach, and Yvgeni Postel were murdered at the Nova Festival Massacre. Sean’s father called to tell him the body was found, “Okay, that’s it, we don’t need to search anymore,” he said.
‘The week that came after was the worst for me,” describes Roey. “If you ask me about trauma, the most intense part of October 7th was the week that came after it. We had one funeral after another, one shiva after another, and then we had the sholoshim when you visit the gravesite again. It was a lot to contain”
The Nova Festival community’s response
Yet from this immense tragedy emerged something remarkable: a community-driven response focused on healing, support and preventing further loss.
The Nova Tribe Community Association was established almost immediately after the massacre by the producers of the Nova festival. The nonprofit’s mission is to support long-term recovery for the 3,500 survivors and 2,500 members of bereaved families through a comprehensive program addressing multiple aspects of post-traumatic growth.
The organization focuses on three main pillars. First, helping survivors and families receive mental health and healing services, while organizing grants for survivors with specific needs and helping them navigate government benefits. Second, memorializing the victims and helping friends and family do this in meaningful ways. And last but not least, what is called hasbarah in Hebrew—educating the international public about the tragic events of that day.
“The foundation understands what the community needs,” explains Roey, who now works with the Nova Foundation and travels internationally to share survivor stories at Nova exhibitions. “You need that support from fellow survivors, and it makes sense that you can only understand what each other is going through after something like that— that's the best form of support.”
Safe Heart, another organization founded on the afternoon of October 7th as an emergency initiative, has spent the past two years accompanying thousands of survivors and their families on healing journeys. The organization developed unique expertise to address trauma treatment, and community support for families dealing with secondary trauma.
Programs like “Brothers in Yoga” and specialized surfing therapy through partnerships with organizations like “HaGal Sheli” are just some examples of programs that have provided survivors with tools for healing that go beyond traditional talk therapy.
“Doing surfing therapy with HaGal Sheli was one of the first things I did after my reserve duty, and it was amazing. It made me feel like I can do stuff, I’m not useless, because it was my first time surfing and I actually succeeded—it enables you.”
These initiatives reflect a fundamental understanding that healing from trauma requires more than individual therapy—it demands community, purpose and connection.
Roey himself went to reserves dirty (milium) just two weeks after October 7th, serving at a command center in the Sha’ar HaNegev region. Though he wasn’t a combat soldier, the sense of purpose helped him initially process the trauma. “I had this feeling that I had to do something,” he explains. “It made me feel, at the beginning, at least, better. Like, I’m doing something, I’m not just drawing in my feelings.”
After several months of reserve duty, he took time to focus on his own healing—attending retreats, starting therapy (something his family background didn’t traditionally embrace), and eventually finding his way to advocacy work with the Nova Foundation. He also describes how he became closer to the bereaved families of his friends who were murdered, and how they support each other through shared loss.
“I am very close to the families, we were close before, but now it’s different. They make me feel very, very meaningful,” he describes. “To this day, we see them at least once a month, and immediately after October 7th, we would meet once a week. The families of the three friends didn’t know each other before, and know they meet every Friday at the same place, sometimes we join.”
Preserving memory, building future
The Nova Foundation has taken the story of October 7th around the world through the traveling Nova Exhibition, which has appeared in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Toronto, Buenos Aires, and will soon open in Berlin—for the first time in Europe—this October.
“I first had the opportunity to be part of the Nova exhibition in Miami,” he says. “It was challenging, super hard, and it was very meaningful at the same time, because I got the opportunity to tell my story to people and to feel that I'm doing something that can make a change, even just speaking about my friends' names.”
These exhibitions serve multiple purposes: to educate international audiences about what happened, to raise funds for survivor services, and to provide survivors themselves with opportunities for advocacy and meaning.
“It’s happening in Berlin soon,” Roey notes about the upcoming exhibition, as he prepares for his flight to Europe. “It’s even more meaningful because of where we will be. There are going to be people there on the fence, who don’t know, who only see what gets to them through TikTok and Instagram. This is part of the job.”
Beyond the Nova community, cultural institutions across Israel have mobilized to preserve the memory of October 7th and support collective healing. The National Library of Israel launched a “Bearing Witness” project to document and archive materials from that day. In another example, photographer Ziv Koren compiled a photography book capturing the tragedy and its aftermath. These are just a few examples of many.
Rebuilding the ruins
For communities directly impacted by the October 7th attacks, the work of physical rebuilding mirrors the psychological healing process—both are ongoing, complicated and marked by tensions between the desire to return and concerns about safety.
Kibbutz Nir Oz, where roughly one-quarter of the community was either killed or kidnapped, reached an agreement with the Israeli government in 2024 for a $95 million reconstruction plan. The kibbutz, located less than a mile from the Gaza border, faces the enormous challenge of rebuilding homes, infrastructure and a sense of security.
Kibbutz Be’er has launched its own rebuilding initiatives, including relocating its art gallery to continue cultural programming even as physical reconstruction continues. Organizations like Rebuilding Kibbutz Be’eri work to address not just the physical infrastructure but the emotional and psychological needs of returning residents.
Long road of recovery
Two years after October 7th, Israel remains a nation in mourning—and in motion. The war in Gaza continues. Hostages remain in captivity. Soldiers continue to fall. The trauma is still ongoing, not historical.
Yet the response to this trauma reveals something essential about Israeli society: a refusal to be defined solely by victimhood, even while acknowledging immense suffering. The survivors who became advocates, the communities that immediately formed support networks, the families who meet monthly to honor their dead while supporting each other—these are the faces of resilience.
Mental health experts note that without closure—without the return of all hostages, without an end to war—complete healing remains elusive. But healing doesn’t require the absence of struggle. It requires community, purpose, and the determination to keep moving forward even while carrying profound grief.
The nation of Israel is one of resilience. Built on the very foundations of rebirth, the modern state and culture leave almost no room to pause and envelop itself in victimhood. That’s not to say that the country hasn’t suffered, hasn’t mourned. Israel has, and it continues to do so.”
As Israel marks two years since October 7th, the question isn’t whether the trauma will fade—it won’t, not completely. The question is how a nation processes collective trauma while simultaneously building toward a future.
Jenna Romano is a writer, editor and blogger. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Telavivian, Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz, Portfolio, Wix Blog, and more.