Yuval Raphael. Photo courtesy of Mor Tzidon.
By ERAN SWISSA
JNS
One morning, when Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Supernova music festival massacre, was a 6-year-old girl, her father announced they were relocating to Switzerland.
The family packed up their apartment in Moshav Pedaya and moved to Geneva for three years. Now, 15 years after returning to Israel, Raphael will once again board a plane to Switzerland—this time as Israel’s representative in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
“After what I went through on October 7, my whole family sat together and remembered my childhood in Switzerland,” she recalls. “During that conversation, I started crying for the first time after what I had experienced.”
Q: Why then specifically?
A: Something suddenly opened up in me. This was long before “The Next Star” [televised singing competition] was even on the agenda, and before anyone knew the Eurovision would be held in Switzerland. But it just happened, and in hindsight, things connected.
Q: If I had told 9-year-old Yuval that she would return to Switzerland as Israel’s representative, what would she have answered?
Yuval Raphael: Nine-year-old Yuval would have said it would have happened much earlier. At that age, in my head, I was already living in Hollywood. I told myself, “You’re going to be a big shot, something very big, and you’re going to sing on massive stages.” Those were the years when I most believed in myself.
Scheduling a meeting with Raphael, 24, was almost impossible, despite numerous attempts. She will soon fly to Basel to begin rehearsals for Eurovision 2025, which will take place on May 13-17.
“I’m rehearsing around the clock,” she shares. “I do vocal development four to five times a week, sleep with a humidifier that keeps the vocal cords moist throughout the night, so I wake up as fit as possible. I also do a lot of treadmill work to condition my body, because an accelerated heart rate takes more oxygen—and the entire song depends on oxygen, breathing and air. I’m training myself to function with less, to simulate the situation as much as possible, like being on the Eurovision stage.”
Q: With all the busy schedule, do you find time to enjoy yourself?
A: I’m engaged in what I’ve always dreamed of and also knew I would do. All my life, I wanted to be a singer, for this to be my main occupation that I would work at. But remember that my first song in my career is a Eurovision song. It’s not from zero to a hundred—it’s from zero to a million.
Q: What is Eurovision pressure compared to that morning, on that terrible Saturday, when Raphael went out with her friends to dance at the nature party in the Gaza border region, on the Simchat Torah holiday, and they found themselves fleeing from the worst massacre in the history of the State of Israel?
For seven hours, they hid in a small bomb shelter near Kibbutz Be’eri, with Raphael lying underneath bodies and pretending to be dead, even after she was hit by shrapnel herself. She and her friends left there alive, but traumatized. “I had very difficult hours in the shelter. In order not to be murdered, I had to hide with bodies, and to get out of there, I had to step on bodies,” she recounts.
“I’ll say something that probably only those who survived Nova will understand, after you come out of such an event, you’re full of guilt feelings. You ask yourself many questions, and the central one is ‘Why was I saved and not them?’ After I made peace with that, I want to give my dreams a chance.
“It’s something that stayed with me for a very long time. The moment I managed to release that feeling, I thought to myself, you received a second chance at your life, and in the end, you’ll be afraid? What a disrespect that is toward those who didn’t survive. I came to the conclusion that I need to honor what I received and fly with my life.”
Q: How does that manifest?
A: Taking my life to the best place I can, and fulfilling all my dreams.
In the past year, Raphael has repeatedly told the story of her escape from Nova and the moments of fighting for her life. She remembers everything in detail, and when she doesn’t have a busy schedule, she can tell it again and again, for long hours, patiently. Soon she will also tell it in English, to viewers in Europe, who may not be willing to lend an ear.
“I remember we arrived at the parking area in Re’im around 1:30 a.m. and opened a bar in the trunk, and we entered the actual party around 3:30. We set up our kanta [a private area enclosed with embroidered sheets] and went dancing. It was fun at incredible levels, and I really must say it was wow. It was my first time at a big festival, and it was fun to meet people from everywhere, dancing with everyone in the open air.”
Q: You describe a feeling of euphoria.
A: Euphoria is the exact word, until it turned into a nightmare. I was in the kanta when everything started. We were just filming a video for my dad, and two minutes after that the missiles began. I told myself, OK, we’re in the Gaza border region, what did we expect would happen? We thought there would be a barrage, we’d hide—and go back to the party.
Still, Stressful
“I was one of those who wasn’t scared of missiles, because I had the feeling that if something needs to happen, it happens. But Hadar, our friend, was in severe hysteria. She got everyone up and told us, ‘Get yourselves out of here, we’re definitely not staying here.’ We took our things, and then I looked at the sky and saw stripes of missiles. The plan was to drive to a friend who lived nearby, but on the way, there were terrorists. We made a U-turn, saw a small shelter, and went inside.”
No fewer than 60 Israelis crammed into the small shelter, hoping to get out alive—but only a few of them survived. Raphael is one of them.
“We were inside. I sat next to my friend and next to someone else I didn’t know. She held my hand and wouldn’t stop crying. I calmed them both down and said, ‘Listen, we’re in a protected space, a few minutes, and we’ll split up and go home.’ But then the first shooting inside the shelter started, and when it ended, the first thing I saw was her head on my shoulder. She died on me.
“At this stage, I was on the phone with my dad, who told me to lie down and pretend I was dead. The terrorists entered and exited about 10 times, while I was hiding under bodies. There were shots and grenades, and it was a nightmare Satan himself couldn’t have created. I’m the only one in my row in the shelter who survived—everyone else was murdered.”
Q: There was someone else who was murdered and her body was lying on your leg.
A: The body that was on my leg was my biggest trauma from the whole situation. Both in terms of the physical pain, and in terms of my inhumanity, because I hid using her. This stayed with me for a long time afterward.
Q: Do you know who she was?
A: Yes. Two weeks ago, I met with her mother, and it was one of the most important things I’ve done in my life. Because I carried so much guilt with me, and the last thing I expected was to close the circle with her mother. I thought maybe she would hate me, because there was a lot of inhumanity in the shelter, and I had to try to survive, and I used her daughter. Even without being a mother, I can understand her pain. I look at it through her eyes.
Q: And how did she react?
A: She heard everything I had to say, hugged me, and started crying herself. She told me she hasn’t slept well for a year and a half, and wanted to know that her daughter didn’t suffer, because every second there, in the shelter, breaks the soul. She had heard many rumors about her daughter’s death, but had no tangible proof.
Q: Did you know how to give her the details she was looking for?
A: Yes. In one of the recordings with my dad, the first shooting had already happened, and I told him I had a body on me. I knew to tell her that before her daughter had time to understand what was happening there—she was already no longer alive. She didn’t see atrocities and didn’t suffer. I left there feeling like a building had been lifted off my shoulders.
Q: In your group, everyone made it out alive, that’s nothing short of a miracle.
A: From that day on, all of us friends became inseparable. From morning till night. It’s a shared fate. It’s the only place where my battery gets charged, not drained. When I sit with people who weren’t there, I expend energy, and they will never understand what I went through. With them it’s different.
After all the residue, hardships, and insights that accompanied her life, Raphael came to Season 11 of “The Next Star for Eurovision”—and from the first sound she uttered, she captivated the judges’ panel and the viewers at home. In Basel, she will take the stage with the ballad “New Day Will Rise,” written by Keren Peles, and will try to advance from the second semifinal, which will be held on May 15, to the coveted final.
‘Desire to reach focus’
After recovering from the great disaster in the Gaza border region, and amid the busy rehearsals for the huge competition in Europe, Raphael managed to find love—singer Ido Malka, whom she met on “The Next Star.”
“It comes when you least expect it and when your head is completely elsewhere, and that’s what happened,” she shares. “We’ve been together for a bit over two months.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
