A memorial for a group of 16 female soldiers killed on Oct. 7 during the attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Jan. 23, 2025. The memorial was erected by the parents of the soldiers, who got an official, brown historical marker to point the way from a local road.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

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How—and Where—to Build an Oct. 7 Memorial

Advisers gather physical and digital artifacts related to the Hamas massacre, and get advice from curators who undertook a similar task after 9/11

by
Hillel Kuttler
January 30, 2025
A memorial for a group of 16 female soldiers killed on Oct. 7 during the attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Jan. 23, 2025. The memorial was erected by the parents of the soldiers, who got an official, brown historical marker to point the way from a local road.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

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The gray layer of outlined ash hints at the round glasses that once stood on the small shelf unit now resting on a floor in a storage room at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The ash attests to the fire that engulfed the kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023, during Hamas terrorists’ rampage in Israel’s western Negev. Next to the shelf sits a transparent box containing the tins of yahrzeit candles lit nearby by parents of soldiers killed defending the kibbutz that day.

“Take this shelf,” said Dina Grossman, who’d come to the kibbutz one late December morning from Jerusalem, where she is the director of digital heritage projects for the Ben Zvi Institute, a research body. “You see it and know that much drama occurred here. Artificial intelligence can’t fake it. This is something very authentic and real.”

The shelf and candles are among 1,300 items housed in the building—which is the culture club for the still-evacuated kibbutz—and on the second floor of the dining room across the way. Another 1,700 items are kept in two buildings at Kibbutz Be’eri, with 15,000 items from other invaded communities expected to be stored at a rented warehouse in Netivot, a town to the east. Eventually, a modern warehouse might be built.

1,700 Oct. 7 artifacts contained in boxes in a storage room in Kibbutz Be’eri
1,700 Oct. 7 artifacts contained in boxes in a storage room in Kibbutz Be’eri

Courtesy the author

The items are what Grossman called the “artifacts of trauma” and constitute part of a comprehensive archive of the Oct. 7 catastrophe.

Each artifact can be located on an internal database by category or source, such as “books” or “Kibbutz Kfar Aza.” On a shelf in a building that once was the nursery school at Kibbutz Be’eri sits a ruined TV stand, tagged “KBR.193.2023,” next to a photo taken post-Oct. 7 of the stand at its location in the person’s home on the kibbutz.

In a country speckled by plaques, stones, gardens, overlooks, hiking paths, rooms, buildings, and entire communities honoring lives taken by terrorism and war, Israel is tackling perhaps its most gargantuan, sorrowful task: memorializing the calamity of Hamas’ invasion and its murder of 1,200 people.

The mission is vast, encompassing not only how to mark the trauma but where to do so. That could mean a national museum-memorial or a series of sites linked thematically throughout the Eshkol regional council (akin to an American county), where Hamas infiltrated more than 20 communities—or a combination of these approaches.

The undertaking is complex, those involved explained, because the period beginning Oct. 7 hasn’t concluded, given that the wars instigated by Hamas near the Gaza Strip and by Hezbollah in northern Israel are ongoing (fragile cease-fires are now in place), so there’s not yet the perspective of time or a respite of calmness as a buffer.

 

But within days of Oct. 7, a loosely organized group of specialists from around the country—including archaeologists, preservationists, historians, researchers, librarians, archivists, and photographers—meticulously began gathering evidence to tell the story of what happened to the people in the affected kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. They’re still doing so. Some of the experts work for government agencies and think tanks. Others represent no official body but contribute unique skills.

Nearly every person interviewed for this story used two verbs to pinpoint the current stage of the memorialization: documenting and gathering. They employ their training, experience, and sharp eyes to select relevant items, making no judgments about the items’ worthiness and erring on the side of caution: collecting, as opposed to not. They’re intent on accomplishing the task before the completion of the razing of the hundreds of torched houses and other structures, many of which already have been pulled down. The idea is to preserve for posterity the look of the settings in the invasion’s immediate aftermath. They’re also dedicated to preserving the ephemeral—one interviewee spoke of the tangible and intangible testaments of Oct. 7—such as websites and social media posts that can be gone from one minute to the next if not preserved.

“We have to work on it now. Otherwise, the memory will be lost,” said Nirit Shalev Khalifa, Grossman’s colleague, who spends so much time in the area that she lives at Kfar Aza during the workweek. “We’re in a race against time.”

It’s for other planners to decide how the artifacts will be used, she said. Her task is ensuring that the physical artifacts are salvaged.

The project proceeds amid what the experts involved called the inherent conflict between razing and rebuilding, between mourning the past and living beyond it.

“There’s a tension between commemoration and rehabilitation of a building and community. I think that’s the heart of the matter. If you just do commemoration, you’ll be living in a museum, like Auschwitz,” said Raanan Kislev, an architect who was the longtime head of the Antiquities Authority’s conservation department. Conversely, he said, “You can’t rehabilitate without commemoration, because you can’t sweep away your history. Only with balance can you have recovery and healing.”

He spoke as we walked in the Vineyard neighborhood of Kibbutz Be’eri. Kislev grew up on Be’eri but long ago moved away; his mother, 92, still lives there and survived the Oct. 7 massacre through “a miracle,” he said. Kislev now is an adviser to the kibbutz on options for commemorating its losses—Hamas murdered 101 Be’eri residents, kidnapped 32, and torched more than 100 structures. As we passed the home of Ohad and Raz Ben Ami—the couple was kidnapped; Raz was released in December 2023, while her husband remains in Hamas’ captivity in Gaza—we heard heavy machinery at work. We walked to the source and saw rubble, of what once had been homes, being cleared away.

New houses figure to be built in the rectangular plot of land. Kislev considered a question on whether ruined homes, at Be’eri or elsewhere, will be preserved as memorials. It’s up to each community to decide, but leaving them in place could be traumatic for residents, particularly children, he said. One solution he mentioned would be relocating one or more of them beyond the kibbutz’s property.

“The question is whether, in the future, you leave the houses here and want buses to come and people to look,” he said. “You can move a house outside the gate, and people can see it.”

Some makeshift memorials in the Eshkol region figure to become permanent, like the field where terrorists murdered 364 people at the Nova music festival and the junkyardlike spot on Moshav Tekuma housing hundreds of shot-up and torched cars driven by festival attendees. Thousands of people daily stop at both places.

The parents of the 16 young women murdered at their IDF forward-observation post near Kibbutz Nahal Oz erected a memorial on a nearby hill and paved a path for vehicles to reach it. They even got an official, brown historical sign to point the way from a local road. It’s hard to imagine the national or local governments relocating the memorial.

Then there are the scores of smaller, ad hoc memorials. Parents of some victims have erected concrete benches and planted trees just off Rte. 232, the area’s main road, at or near the spots where Hamas murdered the young Israelis. Individually and collectively, the tributes complicate growth plans, said Oshra Gabay, the coordinator of the council’s heritage department.

Raanan Kislev
Raanan Kislev

Courtesy the author

Families call Gabay daily to ask permission to place a commemoration, and she said she tells them all that, regrettably, the requests must be denied.

“You can’t travel on a road that on its shoulders are stones and memorials. It’s a main, fast road. We’ve spent years on plans to widen it. It’s our home, and we can’t live in a manner that it’s all memorials,” Gabay said. “We’ll of course live with commemoration, but not only. We must have a balance.”

The regional council soon will establish a local forum of Eshkol communities’ representatives to consider memorials in the public sphere, although tributes within communities are for residents to decide internally, she said.

“It’s a long process,” Gabay added. “There’s no shortcut.”

Even as the work of collecting and documenting concludes, the planning stage—what structures to build to house the artifacts, and where—has begun. That will run at least through the end of 2025, when the plans will begin to be executed, said Shira Shapira, who coordinates the Ministry of Heritage’s efforts to tell the Oct. 7 story.

“The documenting stage is the most important. Without [it], we can’t progress to the following stages,” she said.

Beyond being an experienced architect and urban planner, Shapira is someone for whom Oct. 7 struck personally. The oldest of her seven children, Aner, 22, was murdered that day. His story is compelling and vital: He and others escaping Hamas’ carnage at the Nova festival took cover in a roadside bomb shelter. Terrorists arrived and sought to kill them by tossing a grenade inside. Seven times a grenade went in. Seven times Aner would pick it up and toss it out, where it exploded. The eighth grenade killed him.

Shapira makes clear that while her Oct. 7 trauma is both individual and part of the larger story, she’s hardly the only one grieving. “For many people in this war, the personal and the national are intertwined,” she said. “The personal part is mine. I don’t want to talk about it.”

While Shapira oversees the project, she didn’t have to look for specialists to execute the tasks. Their work began even while she sat shiva for Aner.

Within days, the Ben Zvi Institute’s staff began documenting and collecting artifacts. The Antiquities Authority sent archaeologists to Eshkol to photograph each affected building and community, from which it’s been building digital models—a process known as photogrammetry. The National Library of Israel is cataloging written and digital materials—even Hamas’ videos of the atrocities it committed—and is interviewing Oct. 7 survivors.

Already, the library has collected 30 terabytes of material, “a massive amount,” said Raquel Ukeles, NLI’s head of collections. “This frenetic activity to collect material before it disappears means that we’re [preserving] memory,” she said.

An independent initiative, Edut 710 (Hebrew for Oct. 7 Testimony), also is interviewing survivors. Edut 710’s co-founder, Itay Ken-Tor, said he hit upon the idea as a filmmaker who’s produced works for Yad Vashem and interviewed Shoah survivors. In both cases, he and his team help survivors “gain control of the story, which is important in dealing with traumatic events,” he said.

Another private initiative, October 7 Memorial, has collected hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp text messages exchanged by survivors and victims within their communities and outside—“and we think we have only 5% of the messages,” said Yaniv Hegyi, a relocated Be’eri resident who launched the project. “In order to tell the bigger story, we have to tell all of the little stories that happened,” he said.

Hegyi’s tale would include texts he exchanged with friends in Mexico and New York while hiding from terrorists in his home’s fortified room with his wife and children.

“There’s something really special about WhatsApp communication,” said Hegyi, an adviser to the communal-kibbutz movement. “I could tell you that I’m scared in my shelter, but if you read my messages to my friends, when I was scared for my life, it’s a different thing.”

To Amy Weinstein, the vice president of collections and senior curator of oral history at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, sharing her professional experiences with Grossman and Shalev Khalifa means paying it forward—as was done for her.

Weinstein was working as a curator at the New-York Historical Society on Sept. 11, 2001, when the institution’s director assigned her to lead the effort to document the massive terrorist attacks perpetrated by al-Qaida that killed 2,977 people. Weinstein proceeded by feel, first gravitating to the makeshift shrine in Manhattan’s Union Square and the “missing” posters people hung to seek information on loved ones’ whereabouts.

“When this [Sept. 11 attack] happened, I said, ‘OK, let’s think what we can save from here that will be helpful to people in the future. You probably overcollect, but you collect what seems evocative of what seems important around you,” Weinstein said when we met in her 16th-floor office across West Street from the World Trade Center memorial and museum, completed in 2014.

So when Grossman contacted her in 2024 to request a meeting on an upcoming visit to New York, Weinstein said she felt “the clocks were turned back to 2001.”

“We wanted to give back, to be supportive, because it’s not an easy thing to do,” she said.

Weinstein thought of her post-Sept. 11 mission. She’d sought guidance and reached out to staff at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, which opened in early 2001 to commemorate the 1995 domestic terrorist attack on a federal building there that killed 168 people; and at the Columbine Memorial, which would open in 2007 to honor the 13 victims of a 1999 shooting at a Colorado high school.

Besides the Israelis, Weinstein has been approached by those planning memorials to victims of two attacks in Norway in 2011 and to those killed in a 2016 shooting at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub.

She said that she’s been impressed with the Israelis’ professionalism and dedication. Israel’s intimacy makes the effort more personal for those shaping the memorial, she said.

“They were doing a much harder job, because they knew the people whose [burned] houses they were in,” Weinstein said. “There is no road map. You have to draw it yourself. Generally, people try to create a tool kit to help the next people.”

Hillel Kuttler, a writer and editor, can be reached at [email protected].