Much has been said and written about the hostages who survived October 7th – the day in 2023 when Hamas terrorists systematically murdered, abused and kidnapped 1,219 people from 21 different nationalities. The 250 hostages who were able to report described horror, paralyzing fear, abuse (mental, physical and sexual) and loneliness. And upon their return, many pointed to music as a way to cope during captivity.
Music as an anchor for survival
“My body is shaped by music,” says Moran Stella Yanai, a 40-year-old Israeli jewelry designer who was taken hostage while escaping the Nova music festival. “I ran for five hours,” she tells ROLLING STONE. She remembers dodging bullets. Saw friends shot. Ducked under brush. And escaped capture twice by convincing terrorists she wasn’t Jewish. Yanai, who is of Moroccan and Egyptian descent, spoke some Arabic. She wore a necklace that said “Stela” in Arabic letters.
But the third time she was caught, loaded onto a jeep with her head covered and taken to Gaza, where she said she was sold to Hamas. Yanai counted eleven transfers and was held in five different apartments. She believes her captors treated her harshly because of her Middle Eastern heritage, calling her a traitor and a spy. And swore she would never return home alive. It was a time of absolute despair.
“My Way” as a mantra
Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” served as her “mantra, prayer and guide.” The 1969 song is a cherished childhood memory that conjures up images in her mind. From listening to the radio with her mother on Saturdays. “When I hear the song, I’m at home,” says Yanai. “It’s my safe place.”
Yanai played the Sinatra classic in her head. “I thought, ‘My way, I’ll do it my way,'” she says. “Every time I was abused, I would sing to myself, ‘And now the end is near, so I face my final curtain,’ and find the strength to carry on. You dissociate to survive. You leave the situation and travel to another place in your mind. The scariest thing is losing faith. When you lose faith, it’s over.”
Radio fragments and connection to reality
For Doron Steinbrecher, who was kidnapped from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza and held for 471 days, sporadic access to a radio became a lifeline. “Music helped us keep a little part of our sanity,” she says. “Being able to listen to even a little bit of the radio and catch music from home really helped me maintain a connection to reality.”
One day she heard a snippet of the electro-dance song “Disconnect Me” by Israeli artists Netta Barzilai and Kfir Tzafrir, written about the Nova festival where 378 attendees lost their lives. “The song touched my soul. It often accompanied us in the tunnels,” says Steinbrecher, who was imprisoned along with Karina Ariev and Daniella Gilboa. “I felt like the song described exactly how I felt in that situation. How it all felt like a bad dream. And how much I wished someone would wake us up from this nightmare or just end it.”
Singing as risk and currency
Steinbrecher occasionally asked Gilboa to sing to her when she needed a morale boost. But singing above ground was risky, especially for women, since under Islamic law it is considered haram for women to sing in public. Still, desperate for food or water, Yanai was willing to take any risk and began singing “Tamally Ma’ak” (“Always with you”), a popular Arabic song, to one of her captors. “He was shocked,” she recalls, “but he came back and said, ‘Sing it again.'”
Music became their currency for survival. When Yanai sang for him, he smuggled her food. At the same time, it reminded her that she had agency even in the deepest darkness. “I’m not a victim, and don’t ever portray me as a victim,” she says. “I want to believe that there is humanity in everyone and all we have to do is find the right button to bring it out.”
Psychological perspective
“A song that connects you to home can be like a rope with which you can climb from a deep pit to something higher,” says psychologist Glenn Cohen, leader of an Oct. 7 survivor debriefing team that documented the hostages’ experiences. A book with his findings, “Surviving and Thriving After Trauma,” is scheduled to be published this year. Since more than a quarter of the Nova festival hostages were kidnapped, music was essential to survival, he adds, “whether they imagined it, sang it or heard it on a nearby radio.”
For 24-year-old childhood friends Guy Gilboa Dalal and Evyatar David, both kidnapped from the Nova festival, songs by hard rock band Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) helped them survive two years of brutality. “It’s as if they wrote songs like ‘Buried Alive’, ‘MIA’ and ‘Save Me’ for us,” says Dalal, describing how they were bound, gagged, closely monitored and, especially in the first eight months, sexually abused by their Hamas captors.
Avenged Sevenfold as a refuge
“When we were being abused, we would take an Avenged Sevenfold album and switch off and close our eyes,” adds David. “We sang in our heads and played guitar parts with our mouths – escaping reality so all we could feel was the music.”
One of her absolute A7X favorites is the song “Gunslinger,” which Dalal met through his older brother Gal. During a hostage release last February, Dalal and David were forced to watch as others – including Omer Shem-Tov, with whom they had been held – returned home, while they themselves were stuck in a nearby van. Their agonizing disappointment was filmed and broadcast by Hamas.
“The song is about a soldier who is fighting a war and missing his home,” says Dalal. “I told Omer to send a message to my brother: ‘Gunslinger.'” It wasn’t a military signal, but a reference to song lines that touched Guy and that Gal later had tattooed on his leg: “The stars in the night, they lend me their light/To bring me closer to heaven with you.”
After Dalal and David were released – along with the last 18 living hostages in October – A7X frontman M. Shadows sent them a welcome message, for which he also received criticism after the video was released. Shadows defended the gesture to ROLLING STONE: “To me, this video is just a human being doing something for another human being. … It’s really about two people who have been through hell. And if we can’t agree on that, it’s very hard to agree on anything.” Avenged Sevenfold had performed in Israel several times, and two of their fans, whom the band knew well, were killed on October 7th.
Encounter after freedom
The three met in person for the first time in December. “We couldn’t believe it,” says Dalal. “That was our favorite singer since we were kids.” David added: “I felt like I was on drugs.”
Alon Ohel, a 24-year-old pianist with Serbian and German citizenship, experienced a similar feeling of a closed circle. “Music has been my lifeline to this day,” says Ohel, who also attended the Nova Festival and was kidnapped from a shelter with Hersh Golberg-Polin. “Music helped me get through the nightmare… and rise above it.”
During his first 52 days confined to an apartment, he hummed Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” – a song that took on new meaning in the total darkness of the tunnels to which he was later relocated. He also sometimes imagined “Roxanne” by The Police to get himself going.
“A song without a name”
His constant companion, however, was Israeli artist Yehudit Ravitz’s “Shir LeLo Shem” (“A Song Without a Name”), particularly the line: “For my song is a leaf in the wind/Faded, forgotten/It is the gentle light that opens in my nights/It is you who come towards me.”
Knowing the meaning of this song to her son, Ohel’s mother Idit invited artists to cover it. She also had the idea of placing a yellow piano in Geisel Square in Tel Aviv with the inscription “You Are Not Alone,” a play on her son’s name. She even organized a live concert at Kibbutz Zikim near the border, hoping Ohel could hear the loud speakers in Gaza.
He didn’t hear it because he was underground. But after hostage Eli Sharabi, who had become like a father figure to Ohel in captivity, was released, he reported that Ohel was constantly humming “A Song Without a Name.” The singer Yehudit Ravitz was so moved that she recorded a special version just for him. And a month after his return, Ohel played the song himself at Geiselplatz.
Hope and future
“I was alone,” said Ohel, who suffered an eye injury during his 738 days as a hostage and reported being starved, chained, beaten and sexually abused. And although he knows the road to physical and emotional recovery is long, he is determined to “conquer the world with kindness and music.”
He is currently rehearsing for a concert scheduled for February 9th in Tel Aviv where he will perform alongside a number of Israeli artists, including other October 7th survivors. “Music is an international language,” he says. “It conveys hope and happiness. I want to tell the world: You didn’t win. I’m winning right now.”