Israelis Remember Their Dead—With Stickers

Clil Cohen, a petite 16-year-old, leaped as high as she could and slapped a round sticker about 7 feet up the outer wall of an elevator shaft on a train platform at Tel Aviv’s Hashalom station on a recent Wednesday afternoon. The sticker depicts her brother, Sgt. Maj. Ohad Cohen, in uniform below a drawing of a bird and the day he died: Oct. 7, 2023.

The approximately 350 stickers already occupying the wall, plus hundreds more on the elevator shaft’s three other sides, made finding a vacant spot challenging for Cohen. Each sticker memorializes a civilian murdered at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 or a soldier or police officer killed in Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and Hezbollah. (I have not seen any across the country memorializing civilians whom the terrorist groups killed in communities near the Gaza Strip and in northern Israel.)

While the designs, colors, shapes, and sizes vary, the stickers tend to include the same information: the deceased’s photo, name, life span, and, if applicable, military rank in the Israel Defense Forces.

Most (although not Cohen’s) include a motto connected to the person. Collectively, these are epitaphs of comfort and loss. A selection:

“If you can dream it, you can do it,” on a green-and-white rectangular sticker memorializing St. Sgt. Hillel Shmuel Saadon, shown off-duty atop a horse.

“Be happy! Be Nahman!” on one for Nahman Dekel, smiling and uniformed but without a rank given.

“Don’t forget to smile!” reads St. Sgt. Yakir Levy’s circular sticker.

“The ripening, not the fruit; the journey, not the advancement,” for Itamar Shemen, a combat medic.

“We’ll never get back the days we didn’t smile” is what Liel Itach’s loved ones placed on side-by-side stickers with different designs and pictures showing him grinning.

“Only those climbing high get to breathe the summit’s air,” reads one soldier’s, but his name is covered by a sticker for Anita Lisman, murdered at the festival: “You’ll never find the rainbow if you look down.”

“The greatest trait someone can have is being able to make another person happy. Be good. Be Shachar,” for St. Sgt. Shachar Friedman.

And these in English for St. Sgt. Amit Most: “Do your best and leave the rest”; and in French for St. Sgt. Elie Valentin Ghnassia: “Always be in a good mood and ready to defend Israel.”

Cohen stepped back to absorb the assemblage of stickers. Her body, too, is a memorial to Ohad. On her left arm, Cohen sports a tattoo in her brother’s handwriting; on her right wrist, a bracelet in block letters. Both read, “Be happy in your life,” a play on the traditional Jewish phrase and tune, “Be happy on your holiday.” The siblings last saw one another at Ohad’s military base on the festival of Sukkot. He uttered the former phrase to her that afternoon. “It was something new that he said,” she explained. “He wanted people always to be happy.”

He was killed a few days later defending Kibbutz Be’eri against Hamas’ invasion, shot to death while bandaging a fellow soldier.

Ohad grew up on Moshav Idan south of the Dead Sea. Pre-army, he helped abused children. He appreciated Jewish tradition and enjoyed celebrating holidays. Budi was his nickname since playing soccer in childhood.

Cohen and her parents are considering printing new stickers to include Ohad’s saying and a QR code that, like some others, links to a memorial page on Instagram. Meanwhile, she distributes the stickers she has. On a recent delegation of soldiers’ survivors to the United States, she stuck 40 of them in Times Square and on the insides of rides at the Hersheypark and Great Adventure amusement parks.

“I want people to know he did good,” she told me.

Cohen’s southbound train arrived while we were talking, and she hopped aboard.

Her words left Tel Aviv resident Jeff Weiss impressed.

“You can see how proud she is of her brother,” he said as the train departed.

Ohad’s words “were his instruction to her,” he said, and, like most of the memorial stickers, are “a message for how to live your best life.”

Weiss is assembling the stickers for a website he’ll launch by the first anniversary of Hamas’ rampage—and for a subsequent book.

To Weiss, the messages fascinate for what they reveal about Israel and its people during this troubled period. They strike him as wise, optimistic, edifying—beacons generally, but especially for Israelis stuck in the Oct. 7 abyss. While out and about each day, he seeks new stickers expressing values. Weiss photographs them to add to his digital stock, an adult variation of his hobby of collecting baseball cards growing up in New York and Arizona.

Weiss, 62, is a patent lawyer turned entrepreneur in an electronic cigarette startup, but Israel has long been his passion. He co-wrote two books on key contributions of American veterans of WWII to the Jewish state: fighting in the War of Independence and founding Israel’s air force. Weiss moved to Israel two years ago, already fluent in Hebrew.

Weiss’ sticker-collecting project emerged while walking last March toward Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market and seeing this message on a sticker pasted to a lamp post, memorializing Sgt. Omri Niv Feierstein, 20: “You didn’t fight out of hatred for those in front of you but out of love for those behind you.”

“It is a beautiful and classically Jewish sentiment,” Weiss said of the Feierstein sticker. “I love it because it so completely contradicts the gross caricature among Israel-haters that Israel and its soldiers are motivated by [a] thirst for violence.”

The encounter “turned the light bulb on, that I need to pay attention” to the stickers, that “there’s wisdom there,” Weiss said.

Weiss has since collected digital images of about 400 stickers, although many more exist, including multiple uses of certain sayings. Weiss’ website will categorize the stickers thematically: positivity, tikkun olam (improving the world), persistence, excellence, growth, love, joy, daring, overcoming obstacles, friendship, authenticity, responsibility, leadership, rules of life, sacrifice, kindness, soldiering, and humility.

Some of the mottos come from the deceased: expressions verbalized, excerpts from diary entries, text messages. Some are favored lyrics from songs or statements in Jewish texts. Others were projected onto the person postmortem by loved ones to encapsulate the deceased’s outlook.

“When you bring [the stickers] together, they form a nearly perfect set of instructions on a life well lived,” Weiss said. “When you look at the stickers as an expression of a collective, a generation, it’s breathtaking. A lot of people wrote them off as the TikTok generation, yet they’ve performed magnificently, heroically [in battle]. More than that, they’ve left behind a wonderful guidance on how to live a meaningful life.”

More conventional tributes dot the Israeli landscape post-Oct. 7, and official memorials are in the works. On a desert trail that Cohen enjoyed hiking, his family built a lookout point and QR codes there tell visitors about him. Karin Journo, a 23-year-old Nova victim, is similarly memorialized near her home in Mazkeret Batya. St. Sgt. Noa Price, 20, was a forward observer at an army base adjacent to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and her parents built a public garden overlooking Gaza, near their home in Mabuim.

The stickers are more mobile and accessible than monuments, of course. They’re ubiquitous in public spaces, primarily in cities: on lamp posts, bus shelters, Jerusalem’s light-rail stops, and train stations’ waiting rooms, staircases, and platforms. The smiling faces—as most of the deceased are portrayed—beckon. In this do-it-yourself era, almost everyone can design and print their own stickers. They appear organically, from the grassroots, with no entity directing their production or providing funding.

And while stickers advocating social causes and political candidates have long adorned vehicle bumpers in Israel, as in the United States, this epoch’s productions are different. They tap into Israelis’ psychic need for inspiration and hope now. They’re real, and often profound without meaning to be. A loss mourned is implicit rather than blatant. They scream humanity. They’re pro-living, not “anti-” anything: not even anti-Gaza or anti-Hamas. Weiss, in fact, said he can’t imagine a Palestinian parallel of life-affirming stickers posted in Gaza.

“It’s a social phenomenon,” Nirit Shalev Khalifa, who heads the visual history and documentation department at Jerusalem’s Ben-Zvi Institute, a research body, said of the stickers. “You want everyone to remember your child. We all want people’s attention for what’s valuable to us.”

Weiss is sensitive about the project, intent on doing things by the book. He’s hired a law firm to ask families if it’s OK to reproduce their stickers and to request musicians’ permission for displaying stickers with their lyrics.

Oren Barzilay, a singer-guitarist in Ramat Aviv with the band Dr. Kasper’s Rabbit Show, is among those who will be approached. Price’s parents told him that her sticker includes the band’s lyric, “Everything will be OK/We’ll shine again.” She’d painted the words on an inside wall of the Nahal Oz bomb shelter just five days before Hamas killed her and 14 other observers there and kidnapped seven to Gaza, all 22 of them women—and hours after she saw Dr. Kasper’s perform at a broader event in Rishon L’Zion.

The call left Barzilay stunned. The band hadn’t planned to play the song, “Everything Will Be OK.” He thought it wasn’t well known, yet he played it and the audience—perhaps Price, too—together sang the chorus, containing the words now on the sticker. “What happened to Noa is very hard for me. I have a daughter who will be drafted soon. I can’t sing this song without thinking of Noa,” he said. As to Price painting the lyric at what would be her murder site, and the words appearing on her memorial sticker, he said, “It makes me emotional.”

A second Price sticker was produced, too. “The light in your heart will overcome every obstacle on the path to your goal,” it reads. Her commander, Michal Rozenblum, wrote it on the inside of Price’s beret at the unit’s graduation ceremony.

“Noa had light in her eyes and her heart. Training and completing the course wasn’t easy. She didn’t back down to challenges. We try to give meaning through these stickers, to enable people to get to know Noa,” said her mother, Sigal Price. “I’d like to create a deeper, meaningful memorial. On the other hand, it’s so emotional to see the meaning Noa’s friends attach. They keep asking me for stickers. It’s important to them. It’s physical and it’s on social media. People can enter Noa’s page, read her stories, see her beret, the shelter. People get inspired and feel closer to the fallen soldiers.”

Inbal Journo gets some of that, too. When she sees a passenger at a bus stop looking at her daughter’s sticker, she approaches and explains some of Karin’s spirit: her love of life, joy among friends, laughing at jokes, easy demeanor and unflappability, live-and-let-live approach. It’s common for the passenger to hug Journo.

“Each person lives with his or her scars,” the sticker reads.

A literal scar nearly saved Karin from the Nova massacre. She’d broken a leg while working at El Al assisting fliers with mobility issues, so she sold her Nova ticket. But she reconsidered and bought another ticket three days prior to the show. A friend drove her there. He and her other friends survived. Karin did not.

Her parents printed the sticker days later. Few others existed then, so they think theirs was among the first, at least where they live. The couple stuck them on storefronts and at intersections in town. Then, an Israeli rabbi who’d met Karin at a synagogue in Medellin, Colombia, showed up with a sticker he designed. It shows a smiling Karin above a yellow heading that reads, “Don’t leave, ray of sunlight,” a play on her given name. Karin and the rabbi were supposed to meet when he returned to Israel last October.

“It’s hard to forget me?” she joked when he called soon after landing. And that’s what he also printed on her sticker, minus the question mark. Inbal hopes the affirmation holds, that her daughter’s spirit endures.

“I want people to know her, that she didn’t just disappear,” Inbal said. Of the forest of stickers amid which Karin finds herself, she said, “It’s painful to see that there are so many. I always think of their mothers.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘I can’t do.’ There’s only ‘I don’t want to,’” is what Adi Rozenfeld said she tells her teenage daughters all the time.

“It’s a statement of winners. It’s a lesson I live my life by,” she said.

Her boyfriend, Lt. Gil Ayzen, frequently uttered the aphorism. It’s stayed with her nearly three decades since his death in a notorious episode dubbed the Helicopter Disaster, when two choppers aloft crashed on a rainy night, killing 73 IDF soldiers being ferried into Lebanon during Israel’s war there.

It’s what Rozenfeld said she’d have printed on a memorial sticker for him today. Weiss’ project hits close to home. Rozenfeld is a partner at the law firm that’s advising him.

“The stickers are for looking forward, not backward, the way we want to live. They show what lions we are,” she said.

Perhaps telepathically, Weiss channeled some of that stick-to-itiveness while competing in an ultramarathon at Lake Tahoe last year. He’d flown out of Israel three days before Oct. 7 and, at the Oct. 14-15 race, experienced severe knee problems about halfway along the 72-mile course. He considered dropping out. He thought of signs he sometimes sees at marathons, “Pain is temporary. Victory is forever.” He forged on and finished the race.

“That’s the thing about these signs, these slogans. Who knows which will inspire a person at a particular stage in life?” he said.

Two days after the train station meeting, we were now sitting a few miles away at Dizengoff Circle, a park with a fountain that’s become a popular memorial for Israelis killed since Oct. 7. Along the fountain’s perimeter rest hundreds of framed pictures, personal items, stuffed animals, placards, yellow ribbons, Israeli flags, wilted and fresh flowers and wreaths—and seemingly as many stickers, far less vivid in the harsh sun than those in the covered train stations.

I was shaken to see pictures and stickers of two men I’d written about in Tablet: Saar Margolis and Reef Harush; one, Itamar Tal, a fatality in the bombing of a Gaza building that killed 21 Israelis total, including Cydrick Garin, about whom I’d written a third Tablet story; one, Jawad Amar, who was mentioned in a fourth story; and another, Ben Avishai, whose funeral I attended. I never met any of the five fallen soldiers, but that’s one-degree-of-separation Israel for you.

I wondered how these items could possibly stand out with passersby, to what extent people can digest the individuality of so many dead fellow citizens. I pay attention to every television report of an Israeli fatality, usually read clusters of stickers in train stations I travel in—and nevertheless feel bad about being unable to remember the names and details of each grieving person’s child, spouse, parent, sibling, and friend. My notes and photos taken for this story include scores of these irreplaceable young people: names and stickers I absorbed intently and in some cases scribbled on a page. I could have taken a small step to memorialize them in print, but didn’t, while I mentioned others, both for no good reason.

Or is it OK that so few stickers and the people they represent penetrate the consciousness of those who don’t know them personally? I hope that mourners don’t expect more from us and aren’t hurt.

Asa Shapiro, who heads Tel Aviv University’s advertising and marketing studies, sees a social dynamic at play whereby the stickers’ reach is snowballing into a “herd phenomenon” of bereaved families sensing that “it’s obligatory to [post them] because it’s what people do.”

He added: “There are so many dead”—772 members of the security forces (as of Sept. 1) and 364 Nova attendees—“and the fear is that the person will be forgotten. It’s a way to cut through the clutter.”

But standing out is difficult, ironically, as more and more stickers appear.

Shalev Khalifa, the Ben-Zvi Institute analyst, figures that loved ones will continue producing stickers beyond the first anniversary of Oct. 7 and then begin to taper off as the year’s fraught emotions subside and seasonal rains, wind, and the loosening glue take their toll on the items themselves, which eventually must fall to the ground and be swept away.

“It’s finite,” she said.