‘Recovery takes time,’ orphans of Oct. 7 say of life three years after massacre

By RIKKI ZAGELBAUM

View of the Mishor Hagefen neighborhood attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, in the southern Israeli city of Ofakim, Sept. 19, 2024. Credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

“We try during our life to move on,” Adi said. “We try to be okay, and we try to continue our life and be happy for ourselves and also for our father.”

The third anniversary of Oct. 7 is a hard day for the siblings. “It’s important to us to get a chance to also feel all the pain and everything that comes with the grief,” she told JNS.

Adi and Liad spoke to JNS via video from Miami and New York City, respectively. They had traveled from Israel to share their father’s story and raise money for the Israeli Children’s Fund, which provides financial and professional support to children who lost parents on Oct. 7.

As they age, the siblings have found their needs continue to change, they told JNS.

“To be honest, I didn’t even know what I even need, what I will need,” Adi said.

The nonprofit, also known as Atufim B’Ahava, helped Adi “understand what are my needs and what are the milestones I will need to overcome with their help.”

The orphans of Oct. 7—children and young adults who lost one or both parents during the massacre—are still struggling with grief, financial instability and the long process of rebuilding their lives, according to Miri Yaacobi-Horowitz, CEO of the nonprofit.

“What we understand is that recovery takes time. It takes a lot of time,” she told JNS. “People would love to go on, especially in Israel. If you are not affected that deep, people start to try to go on, and what we understand is that it will take so long.”

Earlier this year, the Knesset changed the law to issue state support to children up to 30 who lost a parent to terrorism. The law had previously contained a ceiling of 21, according to Yaacobi-Horowitz.

“We also understand that it’s so, so not linear,” she told JNs. “If we see a young adult that starts, but then there is the fall, and again starting and falling.”

Adi and Liad grew up referring to their father as Avi hayafeh, Hebrew for “Avi the handsome,” the adjective a nickname he gave himself.

“If you asked him for his full name, he used to introduce himself as Avi hayafeh, chacham, v’hatzanuah—‘Avi the handsome, the smart and the modest,’” Adi told JNS. “He insisted that his humility is his best quality, of course.”

Avi Zakuto, 53, managed a supermarket in Ofakim. Adi described him as “the most funny, charismatic, full-of-life person I’ve ever met.”

Adi Zakuto and Liad Zakuto at Adi’s wedding on July 15, 2026. Credit: Courtesy.

“He used to walk into a room and completely change its energy,” she told JNS. “He used to walk around with a huge smile on his face, and he insisted on getting smiles back.”

The siblings were supposed to meet their father for breakfast and a movie on Oct. 7, one of their Saturday traditions. When rocket sirens began at 6:29 a.m., they called him from Adi’s apartment in Beersheva to assure him that they were safe.

Zakuto, who had moved into a new apartment in Ofakim three weeks earlier, joked as he counted the sirens that perhaps they were “all because of me. I’m such an important personality,” Adi said.

The family later learned that minutes later, Zakuto went outside in flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, and declared that “nothing is going to ruin Simchat Torah,” the Jewish holiday that day.

Terrorists murdered him at about 7:06 a.m., Adi told JNS.

At first, Adi did not think she needed any help processing her father’s death.

“It took me some time to understand that although I’m in my 20s, I still need to get some support and need someone I could lean on,” she said.

The nonprofit helped her with medical school, planning her wedding, buying a car and organizing a memorial for her father on the Sea of Galilee, his “favorite place,” she said.

Liad finished his military service about two and a half months ago and is preparing for a months-long trip in South America. That trip will follow a route his father traveled years earlier.

“My father, when he was in South America, his friend and him wrote a journal with every single place they’d been at and places they saw,” Liad told JNS. “I’m gonna continue his path, and I’m gonna go to the same places he went, and I’m gonna see the world like he did.”

The nonprofit, which still helps the siblings, has identified 573 beneficiaries and plans to support them financially through age 30. It also keeps offering professional guidance beyond that point, Yaacobi-Horowitz told JNS.

The fund tries to supplement, rather than replace, government benefits, which she said are not enough to meet the needs of many families.

“Most of the remaining parents didn’t go back to work, so we are talking about very functional families with two parents working,” Yaacobi-Horowitz told JNS. “One is gone. Eighty percent were the breadwinner, and the parents that remained didn’t go back to work.”

The amount the families receive from the Israeli government still “leaves them in a poverty situation, as far as we see it,” she said.

Ten of the children were born after Oct. 7, meaning the organization expects to be supporting some families until 2053, Mody Kidon, the fund’s founder and chairman, told JNS.

“This is my responsibility, that each one of the kids will get the same treatment, the same money,” Kidon said. “It’s really a huge challenge that we are not going to give up.”

Adi and Liad plan to spend Oct. 7 together, reading the diary that their father kept during his trip through South America and talking about his life.

Adi told JNS that spending the anniversary together was particularly important, because they are away from Israel and their family.

“It’s weird to be far away from home, especially in these days, away from our family and away from everything we know,” she said.

“We wanted to read it in the United States and just talk about his trip to South America and talk about our father and what we are feeling,” Adi told JNS.

Adi and Liad are “the exception,” Kidon told JNS.

“They are the exception in the way they continue with their life,” he said. “Of course, they have trauma. Of course, they remember their father. I’m sure that every day, it’s not that they forgot it.”

“But they decided to continue with their life,” he told JNS. “Unfortunately, most of the victims are still in a different situation, which will take more time, more effort, and we will be there for each one of them.”