Raquel Ohnona Look wipes again tears when her eyes fall on the plaque in honour of her son Alexandre, affixed to a bench in a suburban Montreal inexperienced area that was lately renamed for him.
“Endlessly in our hearts. Our hero,” it reads above his identify and the dates of his delivery and dying — Sept. 10, 1990, to Oct. 7, 2023.
Alexandre Look, a 33-year-old Montreal native, was among the many concertgoers who had been murdered a 12 months in the past Monday on the Supernova music competition throughout a brutal assault on Israel carried out by Hamas militants. He’s amongst not less than eight folks, both Canadian residents or with ties to Canada, who died through the Oct. 7 assaults.
“It’s been a troublesome 12 months. It’s a brand new actuality. Our household dynamic modified,” Ohnona Look stated in an interview final week, simply earlier than Rosh Hashanah. “Clearly he was such an enormous persona, and we’ll by no means be the identical folks as we had been earlier than Oct. 7.”
The day was each father or mother’s worst nightmare, as Ohnona Look and her husband, Alain, bore witness to their son’s last moments from their Montreal residence. They had been on a video name with Alexandre because the Hamas assault unfolded and he huddled in a shelter with about 30 different concertgoers.
His mom heard the gunfire and dropped the telephone in shock. His father picked it as much as attempt to perceive what was occurring. When he heard the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar,” he knew their son was gone.
Ohnona Look says a 12 months later, the feelings are available in waves. “It’s a gap within the coronary heart. It’s anger. It’s trauma, as a result of, you already know, having a toddler murdered, and also you’re on the telephone … it’s one thing you don’t come again from.”
She spent lengthy hours through the previous 12 months making an attempt to be taught the circumstances round her son’s dying, chatting with survivors who had been within the bunker.
“He was a hero that day,” she says she realized. “He sacrificed his life. He put himself within the entrance of the shelter the place they had been hiding,” She says survivors described her son making an attempt to maintain up their spirits whereas the phobia assault unfolded round them.
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He did the identical for his mom throughout their video name, making an attempt to maintain her comforted, asking about vacation meals and retaining his tone upbeat. She even heard him making an attempt to motive with the attackers. “However you may’t motive with monsters,” she says.
In a latest assembly with a primary responder who attended to Look’s physique, she was in a position to fill in some gaps that had been haunting her. The primary responder stated Look was discovered on prime of two folks he had tried to guard on the entrance of the shelter, and he had taken many of the gunshots and grenades. Many survived hiding farther again within the shelter.
“However we all know that’s Alex, and he would have completed that 100 occasions over,” she says. “He was at all times led by his fearless, gigantic coronary heart. That’s how he lived his life.”
She says Look was a born salesman who spoke six languages. He had been most lately dwelling in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, promoting cosmetics. He was in Israel on vacation.
After his dying, the Look household moved from a close-by Montreal borough again to Côte-St-Luc, a predominantly Jewish suburb the place the newly renamed Alexandre Look Place is situated. It’s subsequent to the Jewish highschool he attended and close to the synagogue the place his father prays each morning.
The group grieved with the household and nonetheless does. Throughout an interview with The Canadian Press, not less than a dozen folks, a few of them strangers, stopped to supply hugs, condolences and desires for a Joyful New Yr.
Now she needs to make sure that those that had been killed on Oct. 7 aren’t forgotten — the victims she calls the “Nova Angels” from the music competition in addition to these murdered of their kibbutzes.
They embody Judih Weinstein Haggai, 70, who held Canadian, Israeli and American citizenships. She died on Oct. 7 whereas out for a stroll together with her husband close to the Nir Oz kibbutz, which sits lower than three kilometres from the Gaza Strip. Their our bodies had been being held in Gaza and haven’t been recovered, their daughter has stated.
Vivian Silver, 74, died on the Be’eri kibbutz the place she lived, which additionally sits close to the border with Gaza. For weeks, officers initially believed the Winnipeg-born lady had been taken into Gaza, however her physique was recognized in mid-November.
Others discovered lifeless instantly after the assault included Look and one other Canadian, Ben Mizrachi, 22, of Vancouver.
Hamas additionally killed twin Israeli Canadian nationals Netta Epstein, 21; Shir Georgy, 22; and Adi Very important-Kaploun, 33. Tiferet Lapidot, 22, an Israeli whose household was from Canada, was additionally on the music competition and located lifeless days later.
The feelings stay uncooked, however Ohnona Look says she’s in “warrior mode” in a struggle towards rising antisemitism and to talk for these nonetheless lacking.
“I’m doing what my son would need me to do,” Ohnona Look says. “I’m the voice for all of the forgotten ones, the hostages that also stay … even when there may be solely our bodies, we’d like their our bodies again.”
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