SPECIAL REPORT: The forest where Israel’s 7/10 survivors begin to find peace
In Cyprus there’s a place where Israel’s grieving go to heal. Brigit Grant went to listen
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
I am sitting in the lobby waiting for guests to emerge from dinner. A WhatsApp message has been circulated among those willing to speak. Miri Bronstein is the first. “You want to talk to me?” she asks tilting her head. “I lost my son.”
Miri’s heartbreak punctuates our introduction. We have never met before, but we hug as she cries. Her son was Captain Ben Bronstein, a Duvdevan soldier killed on October 7 when he was called to rescue Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
“He was 24. Just 24,” Miri repeats the number in disbelief. Three months have passed since that dreaded knock on the front door and although she now claims to be “calmer than I was before”, accepting Ben’s death still eludes her. Her husband cries every day and she consoles her married older son Moshiko and 14-year-old daughter, Noa who idolised their brother. “Life is suddenly the opposite of everything it was. We lost one of the main characters in our show.”
The unfathomable disruption to the expected order of life is every bereaved parent’s nightmare. “You don’t want sympathy. You don’t want to talk. My family, especially my twin sister Astar have been by my side. But some think my grief is like the flu. That it will pass in time. But the physical pain… Ben made us so happy.” Miri takes out her phone to show me a video of her son with his girlfriend Adi. “She surprised him while he was in the army base.” Handsome, strong and in uniform, he lifts Adi up in the air as Miri’s eyes fix on the screen. A beat. “He loved serving his country. He’d say to us: ‘I’d rather die than see one citizen get a scratch.’ He was a hero. But I don’t miss the soldier. I miss my son.”
Miri was not the only parent missing her child at the Secret Forest in Cyprus last December. She and her husband Nir were part of a group of bereaved Israeli parents staying at the hillside property for counselling, therapy or just to be united in grief .
Accurately described as a space for rejuvenation in nature, the Paphos hotel is surrounded by verdant greenery and offers a route to wellness with massage, mindfulness seminars, mineral baths and yoga. Left to one’s own devices, the forest bike ride, pampering treatments and Israeli-style kosher buffets are there to be enjoyed in this hidden retreat. But December’s guests were so blinded by sorrow that they had retreated into themselves.
Sitting in couples at separate tables, the parents and grandparents twinned in mourning were strangers when they arrived. But sessions of soul-baring discussions with Israeli therapists brought their chairs closer together. Reaching the evening when their murdered children’s names were written in a new Torah by a scribe, the group were as one.
“We have the same thoughts. I would like to live close to them all,” said Miri, who dreaded leaving the quiet forest for the reality of home in Holon .“When you lose a child you want silence. In Israel there is no silence for me because everyone knows I am a mother of a Commander and everyone wants to talk about him. And Israel is still the main issue in our life. ”
As the parents left, the survivors of the Nova Festival arrived. Rucksacks, bandanas, ‘Bring them Home’ dog tags around their necks, the exuberance of youth disguises the horror in their heads. Much like the parents, they are also strangers to each other but, as a gesture, one of them has gifted necklaces to the group. A silver heart with a hole.
Opening his heart to the bereft of October 7, Yoni Kahana brought them straight to his hotel. Israeli, religious and a father of six, his instinct was to help following the onslaught on his country. Yoni knew Secret Forest was a place to heal when he first visited seven years ago before taking ownership.
“It’s a place to bring people to change their life, change the mind and be more connected. To nature, to themselves to other people.” Yoni has another hotel on the island, but his long-term plan is to create a secret wellness village. “We have plots of land and want to build more villas, more wooden houses so people will come to live a healthy life.”
To have a synagogue on site will please Yoni, but the community he envisions will not be built around it. “It will be there, but life will be built around the atmosphere, because the energy here is different. If there is a way to release the torment, it is here.”
Staying in spacious suites around the pool, the young survivors meet daily with trauma therapists who have a singular aim. “They have seen horrible things and nobody wants to listen to them,” says cognitive behavioural therapist Mihal Azulay. “Here they can share those scenes within the group and not be afraid to cry.”
“The important thing is to give them resources so they can deal with going back to everyday life,” says art therapist Dorit Drori, who uses ‘hand path’ cards and painting memories with sand in her work. Out in the gardens, affable therapist Dan Lustig has set up shop helping the survivors release trapped emotional energy.
“I feel privileged to be able to help,” he says. “To bring some peace to the girl who came to me crying about the blame she feels for running to save her self. That she was lucky, but her friends were not.”
Hours earlier, Dan had comforted a young man crying in the pool. “He lost 15 of his friends. It is too much for someone so young.” “Survivor’s guilt,” says therapist Dr Nava Arkin. “I have been with a girl who lay under her friends’ bodies in order to survive. She stopped talking. She’s overwhelmed. It’s a life changer.”
Hearing about what survivors endured is hard and getting them to share is done with caution. Lital Maya, 27, from Holon spoke of her October 7 experience, which began watching the sunset sitting beside her friend Dr Hagit Refaeli Mishkin, 48, a mother of three from Hod Hasharon.
“We were staying at a farm for a planning meeting for Midburn, Israel’s version of the Burning Man festival. It was 3km from the Nova Festival. At first we only knew about the missiles, not the terrorists.” Amid the panic and confusion, Hagit decided to leave alone in her car. “We didn’t know anything. Later, we heard from people to turn right coming out of the farm. But Hagit was already on the road. She had turned left.”
Hagit was murdered by Hamas terrorists, while Lital remained at the farm for 10 hours relying on information from a drone owned by the farmer’s son. A ditch stopped a truckload of terrorists entering.
“I was walking around. I was terrified, but something inside me told me that I was not going to die, that I still have something to give to this world. When I got home, I slept in the bed with my mother. When I woke I cried all day.”
The days of sadness continued. Lital was told her friend Raz Mizrachi had been slaughtered by Hamas. “That was the most difficult thing that happened because I took her to her first festival a few months earlier. I talked her through everything and said I’d keep her safe. She was like a younger sister.” Raz was only 21 and had just recovered from being gravely injured during an East Jerusalem terrorist ramming while serving in the Border Police in 2021. “On October 7, she wrote me a message at 4.30am as she thought that maybe I was at the Nova,” sighs Lital. “But I didn’t check my phone until 8.50am and she was already gone.”
In the forest with mindfulness and yoga instructor Ronee Rotterman, the survivors stand with their eyes closed. A brief respite from falling tears in the silence enjoyed by Miri.
Almog Yarden holds the pose. He is older than most in the group by two decades, but he has travelled, a festival-goer and psytrance fan who led 50 people out of the Nova festival to safety.
“I was in the mechanised infantry in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] and I’m accustomed to operating in situations that are very tense,” he says. “All I was thinking about was taking myself and my friend to safety, but those kids – 20-plus years old – were devastated. Most of them were on psychedelics and they were scared. I knew that I had to move them or they were all going to die.”
Matter of fact about saving those he could, Almog is now more focused on how the attacks happened. “Because this is way worse than the Holocaust, right? In the Holocaust, we had no power, no position and no idea such a thing would happen. But now? There should have been a whole regiment sitting on that border.”
Almog predicts that rage and demands will follow and an interrogation. “Because we already know that intelligence came daily from those who were murdered.
“They were reporting that something was happening because they saw Hamas soldiers practicing breaching the fence.” That night, Almog is the first on the floor when the yoga room is turned into a psytrance dance space with Ahron the DJ, himself robbed of so many friends, on the decks. Around him, draped in Nova scarves, are survivors who promised: #We will dance again. And they are.
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