Jenny Sividya, a survivor of the Oct. 7 attack on the Supernova music festival in Israel, made several appearances in metro Atlanta including at the signing of Georgia’s antisemitism bill.
She kept thinking, “Everything will be fine. If we just wait for the bombs, if we just wait for the traffic, if we just pick up more people.” Sividya told her story to an audience at Temple Sinai in Sandy Springs on Feb. 1.
Sividya, 41, is a psychologist and mother of two girls, 6 and 7. She and her partner Noam were attending the music festival for his birthday.
“We arrived at 1:30 a.m. to a place that was supposed to be heaven, but turned into hell,” Sividya said.
After an hour at the festival, she bumped into her younger brother, Shlomi, with his new girlfriend, Lilli. They moved to the “chill out zone.” At about 6:30 a.m., the group heard bombing but it wasn’t followed with alarms or sirens, as is typical in Israel, so they thought the explosions were fireworks.
“One look at the sky was enough to see these were no fireworks,” Sividya said of the hundreds of bombs lighting the sky. Some people began to panic as the security announced to “take your belongings and go home now.”
“We didn’t know Hamas was waiting outside,” Sividya told the audience. “People who rushed to leave were the first to be slaughtered.”
Her brother left around 7:30 a.m., while Sividya waited out the traffic. The next few hours were chaotic. At one point, Sividya and her partner packed 15 people into their small car: One hysterical mother of four had been separated from her husband and one man was bleeding from a gunshot wound.
After narrowly escaping Hamas in an orchard, obsessively trying to track her bother, and trying to save lives, Sividya wound up at a police station. It was six days before she was notified that her brother, a 37 year old father of two small children, had been murdered. His girlfriend was also dead.
The fact that she survived Nova means something needs to change, Sividya said. Not politically, but personally. She has started a support group for those who lost family members on Oct. 7.
“It’s a call for us to do something different on a personal level and also in the Jewish [community]. It’s supposed to make us stronger. It highlights the importance of being together. We need to stay [aligned] to fight,” she said. “Not only Jews in Israel, but Jews all over the world.”
Sividya said the first thing she did when she arrived back home was to take her concert bracelet off.
“Some still can’t take the bracelet off,” she said. “But the memories are so vivid that I don’t need the bracelet.”
The event was put on by Faces of October 7th with support from local Jewish organizations.
