Shir Georgy, 22, killed at the Nova music festival. Ben Mizrahi, 22, from Vancouver, used his army training as a medic to save lives at the festival—before being murdered himself. Alexandre Look, 30, of Montreal, killed while shielding his friends. I left it to my colleagues to do the follow-up interviews with their families. I al- ready wasn’t sleeping well due to my son’s sudden death. Evan Shayne Bessner Friedlan was full of life. Beloved by his family and friends, and office colleagues. He was generous, smart, fashionable. He loved creating hip-hop songs, working out in the gym, watching Rick and Morty cartoons, and hockey. He had his whole life ahead of him. I often imagined what it would have been like for me had he been a hostage, or if he had been murdered by Hamas. Would that have made it more bearable, somehow? With a real enemy to blame? As I was suddenly covering personal tragedies on the job, I chose not to reveal my
son Shayne, spent the High Holiday season in Tel Aviv. They had planned a day at the beach on Oct. 7. Instead, their morning was spent watching rockets soar by, with the Iron Dome deployed to destroy them. One rocket hit the building next door to where my friend Mark’s mother Hadassah Kingstone lives. The war was impacting us here in Canada, too. Increasingly, there were questions about whether our government was moving fast enough to help Canadians who wanted to come home. Within the week, a plan was hatched to use the Royal Canadian Air Force to shuttle them out of Tel Aviv to Athens, Greece, where they could transfer to Air Canada. The first of these flights was set to land at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Oct. 13—so I went to find reunions worth reporting on. Natalie and Jimmy Bitton were scanning the giant screen for the arrival time of the flight carrying their 18-year-old daughter Simona. She was volunteering at a daycare
in Tel Aviv, but a week spent in and out of bomb shelters, as things started heating up with Hezbollah in the north of Israel, led her worried parents to put their feet down. The reunion was an emotional one, but Simona also shared her deepest feelings with me. “I want to go back.” I t was easier to report on tearful re- unions than to process the emerging confirmations of young Canadians mur- dered on Oct. 7: Netta Epstein, 21, killed jumping on to a grenade the terrorists tossed into the safe room where he was hiding with his girlfriend. I recognized this attack meant we would have to scramble to cover the biggest Jewish story of my career.
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