On the night of February 5, 2024, Cheryl Eisberg Moin couldn’t sleep. Earlier in the day, she and a friend had visited the site of the Nova music festival and met the bereaved parents of 24-year-old Gili Adar, who had been murdered there on October 7, 2023.

“It was utter devastation,” Moin said. The meeting had been arranged with the help of their tour guide, who knew the Adar family. Gili’s father, Eldad Adar, wanted to talk about what had happened to his daughter. “They took us around the whole site and showed us exactly where Gili had been murdered.”

Ellen Widawsky, a friend of Moin’s, recalled how Orna Adar, Gili’s mother, struggled to light a memorial candle as the wind kept blowing it out, until she finally succeeded.

Moin, an attorney from Great Neck, N.Y., lay awake that night thinking of what could possibly ease an iota of the Adars’ pain. Then, she recalled Orna mentioning that she had sung in a choir pre-October 7 and was about to rejoin. Moin and Widawsky had responded that they, too, sang in a choir and that they were altos. So was Orna.

That musical connection triggered an idea: “What could be more lasting than a piece of music that memorializes Gili and everything she was?” Moin recalled thinking.

She decided to commission a choral piece for the 90-member Shireinu Choir of Long Island and approached noted choral composer David Burger. (Full disclosure: The writer of this article also performs with Shireinu.) Burger wrote the music, with lyrics by Burger and Moin. “Beautiful Child (Gili’s Song)” debuted at the choir’s annual concert in June 2025.

A slew of popular Israeli songs—rousing and tender, determined and vivid—captured the mood of the nation after October 7. In the Eurovision song contest, Eden Golan finished in fifth place in 2024 with “Hurricane,” and in 2025, Yuval Raphael, a Nova survivor, won second place with “New Day Will Rise.” Less well known are the musical reflections that individuals, families and communities are creating, mostly in Israel, to commemorate those they lost.

Gili’s song is one of three of these poignant pieces—from intimate love songs to dramatic choral masterpieces—that share a number of Hadassah connections. Gili was born in Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus in Jerusalem and spent two summers working with teens at Tel Yehudah, Young Judaea’s national leadership camp in Barryville, N.Y., and as a counselor for American teens on Young Judaea’s Year Course. As part of its efforts, Shireinu of Long Island raised money to send 19 Israeli teens to Tel Yehudah.

“Gili looked like her name, which means ‘my joy.’ She was happy, friendly, outgoing,” said Eldad Adar, a health care management professional. “Yet she was very serious, determined, responsible and compassionate.”

After she was murdered, friends tried to describe her, Adar added, and compared her to the sun. That description opens the choral piece. “Beautiful child,” the soloist sings, “we’ll love you forever. You were the sun, not only its rays.”

“Your dazzling life was and is our treasure,” the choir responds. “You’ll stay in our hearts for all of our days.” The song continues: “How can we reclaim our lives that were torn/ with such unbearable loss the whole nation mourns/ How can we heal and find release/ We turn our eyes to the mountains/ Esa einai el heharim/ Yearning for peace.”

“It is important that Gili’s story be told,” said Burger, the composer. “There are few things that can be as healing or moving as the power of music.” 

“For me, this song is also about every beautiful life lost on October 7,” said Deborah Tartell, Shireinu’s musical director. “Over the months of rehearsals, I have come to realize that we are singing for the collective heartbreak of our people.”

The Adars were supposed to attend the June concert, but Israel’s war with Iran prevented their travel. Instead, they watched the video of the performance at their home in Lapid, in the center of Israel (a recording of the concert is available on YouTube). “We played it over and over again on a loop and just cried. We couldn’t talk,” Eldad said. “When people see and think and talk and sing about Gili, it means so much to us.”

The Adars did hear the composition in person when it was performed again at the North American Jewish Choral Festival in Stamford, Conn., in July. They hope it will be translated into Hebrew so it can be sung in Israel.

Several family-initiated pieces have been performed and recorded in Israel. Hannie Ricardo is a musician, singer and the grief-stricken mother of Oriya, a 26-year-old who was murdered at the Nova festival. “Kaddish for Oriya,” a 25-minute oratorio that she composed for soloists, choir, wind orchestra and timpani drums, debuted on October 7, 2024, at The Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. Ricardo, a mezzo-soprano, sang a heartrending solo.

“I lost my daughter in the most violent way, and I answered with music,” said Ricardo, who lives in Zichron Yaakov. “I want the world to see that this is what the Jewish people are made of.”

Both she and her daughter were born at Hadassah hospitals. Even before October 7, Ricardo’s research had centered on the intersection of memory, trauma and music, with a focus on composers imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp. Her great-grandparents, Rabbi Binyamin and Bilhah Ricardo, were taken from their home in Amsterdam to Westerbork, Terezin and Auschwitz, where they died. Her mother survived in hiding and made aliyah in 1950.

Ricardo had been studying music and ethnomusicology at Hunter College in New York City when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7; she flew back to Israel the next day. She eventually transferred to the Jerusalem Academy of Music and received her graduate degree in singing earlier this year.

She had never been a composer, but the process of writing “Kaddish for Oriya” flowed almost effortlessly, she said. The piece layers texts composed in Terezin with a line from the Spanish-Portuguese version of the hymn “Ki Eshemera Shabbat” (“Because I Observe the Sabbath”), which her grandfather taught her as a child, and a quote from “Ba-sivuv” (“Spinning”) by Tuna, an Israeli rapper who was one of Oriya’s favorites. The lyrics describe a woman who’s dancing and flying.

Ricardo recorded a video of herself reading the names of the nearly 400 people killed at the Nova festival, accompanied by their photos. In the oratorio, the video plays in the background as the choir sings the words of the Kaddish. “Some parents of victims are very active. People know the victims,” she said. “But so many don’t have the privilege of being known. That’s why it’s important for me to mention their names. It’s an acknowledgement that they were in this world.”

Ricardo is now expanding the piece to include full orchestration and a larger choir and is planning a series of performances in Israel starting on October 7, 2025.

“Part of me doesn’t want to accept that Oriya is not coming back,” she said. “When I sing to her and the choir calls ‘Oriya!’ she’s here. Her name means ‘light of God,’ and she was the definition of light, love and life.”

For Amit Halivni Bar-Peled, a song recorded on her phone has become a source of solace. On October 9, 2023, her husband, Yuval Halivni, an Israel Defense Forces reserve commander, was killed by terrorists as he protected the residents of Sderot.

Less than two months later, Halivni (she only uses Bar-Peled as her professional name) was scrolling through her phone and found a video she had forgotten about, taken in August 2022. Yuval, in their bedroom, was singing an impromptu love song for her while he was feeding their then-2-year-old son, Jonathan, nicknamed Jon-Jon.

The couple had met as performers on the Israeli Scouts Friendship Caravan in 2010, bringing Israeli music to the United States. They started and ended their tour at Tel Yehudah, where Yuval later spent a summer as one of the scouts, tzofim in Hebrew, specializing in music. He was also a counselor for Year Course. Though Halivni encouraged her husband to pursue a career in music, he instead worked at a high-tech company to better support his family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“I thought I knew all the data on my phone,” said Halivni, a pastry chef and wedding cake designer who lives in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv. “Usually, he would stop singing when I would start to take a video. All my life I asked him to write me a song. But he didn’t, not even for our wedding. Only after he was killed, I found it—the song I wanted him to sing for me. In the song he calls me ‘Ima shel Jon-Jon’ [Jon-Jon’s mother], so it’s a family love song.”

She reached out to songwriter and producer Elai Botner, who arranged it with instrumentation and with a verse that Halivni sings herself. She uploaded the song, titled “V’gam Hamud” (And He’s Also Sweet), to music platforms on Tu B’Av 2024, a traditional day of love on the Hebrew calendar.

“Most songs you hear about fallen soldiers are sad, but this one is not,” she said. “I want to remember Yuval with hope and love.”

Last year, the Tel Yehudah community held a fundraiser to update the shiron (song booklet) used during its singing sessions before Havdalah and dedicated the booklet to Yuval.

“I hope it will help campers connect with Yuval and the man that he was,” Halivni said. “He was always positive and optimistic. I hope the shiron will give people the hope, strength and bonding that comes from singing.” 

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Rahel Musleah leads in-person and virtual tours of Jewish India, and has now added tours of Vietnam and Cambodia. Learn more here.