Shye Klein Weinstein could be any young Zillennial. Arms covered with tattoos, his passions include hiking, rollerblading, kayaking and video games. He could be your son, grandson, nephew, brother, cousin or friend.

But the 27-year-old Toronto native has witnessed more horror in one day than anyone should see in a lifetime.

Weinstein was at the Reading Public Library on Tuesday evening to recount his story of surviving the Oct. 7 Nova Music Festival in Israel and how a magical night turned into a morning of chaos, terror and death at the hands of Hamas militants.

Weinstein traveled to Israel in April of 2023 to visit relatives. But when his planned month-long vacation ended, he decided to stay. One day in September of last year, he was at his cousin’s apartment in Tel Aviv when a friend suggested that they go to this music festival in October. The Super Nova Festival was billed as a “psychedelic trans-music festival” that would attract an international audience.

“I’m not a festivalgoer, usually,” Weinstein admitted. “Those huge parties of thousands of people are not usually my thing.” But he agreed to go, along with his cousin Mordecai, Mordecai’s girlfriend Tamara and five other mutual friends.

The group of eight arrived at the site of the festival in two separate cars at about 2 a.m. (The festival was set to run from midnight to about 4 p.m. the next day.) Their excitement built as they heard the music and saw the flashing lights. After dropping their stuff in the camping area, the group made their way to the main festival grounds.

Weinstein, a photographer, displayed images of the festival site as he described the positive atmosphere at the event. At one point, he decided to break away from his group and walk around the festival taking photos.

“Everyone is happy to talk to me and agrees to have their picture taken,” Weinstein recalled.

At about 5:30 a.m., Weinstein got a text from one of the women in his party, Ellie, asking where he was. He agreed to meet her back at the main festival stage.

It was while they were trying to find each other in the crowd, Weinstein recalls, that the Hamas rockets began flying. As the minutes passed, more and more people began noticing the rockets overhead and soon the music stopped.

Weinstein describes the explosions, the chaos and the screaming as security ushered people out of the festival area. But heading back to the campground, Weinstein says that he noticed something else. Some people were still smiling, joking, laughing and poking fun at Hamas.

Those people, he said, tended to be Israelis, to whom incoming rocket fire was nothing new.

“They shoot rockets at us, the Iron Dome shoots them down and we blow up the guys who sent the rockets,” was their attitude, Weinstein says. “Then everybody goes about their day. That’s the routine that people are used to. That’s what people thought would be the routine that day. Except the rockets didn’t stop.”

The rockets being intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome defense system were so close, he described “feeling the air around our bodies vibrate.”

By now, he recalled, “Everyone is terrified. Everyone is confused. No one is really sure what’s going on.”

As the group gathered back at their camp site, Weinstein’s cousin argued against rushing to leave. The festival grounds were in the middle of the desert and not a heavily populated area. Hamas was not going to waste rockets on a patch of dirt, they convinced themselves. And no one expected anything else to follow after the rockets.

As his companions were packing up their gear, Weinstein again decided to break away to take some photos and see if anyone else needed help. It was as he was heading back to his group’s camp site that he first heard the gunfire.

Although growing up in Canada the only gunfire he had ever heard was in movies and video games, he immediately knew that he was hearing semi-automatic machine gun fire. After he told his friends what he had heard, they headed to the parking lot.

“That’s when Hamas shows up,” he said. He explained that Hamas had entered on opposite end of the festival grounds from the parking lot. He believes that Hamas didn’t know about the festival until they came upon it that day as part of their incursion into Israel.

“We didn’t see them,” he says, “but we heard them. We heard all the gunfire. We heard all the screaming. We heard the explosions. We all knew something bad was happening right on top of us and we had to leave.”

The group piled into the car with Weinstein behind the wheel.

“I stopped focusing on anything else except getting us out of there as fast as possible,” he recalled.

There was the typical traffic jam exiting the concert grounds, he recalls. “Except now, if we take too long, we’re going to die.”

He started to drive the Mitsubishi Lancer off the road, passing the line of cars. He’s white knuckling the steering wheel as they near the exit and he notices that some of the cars ahead of them are abandoned as people decided to run for their lives.

Once they got out of the concert grounds and onto the main road, the way back to Tel Aviv was blocked by police, Weinstein said, “because up ahead along the road Hamas was brutalizing anyone they came across.”

In the opposite direction, traffic was building. Deciding not to wait, Weinstein drove across a dusty field, where amid getting shot at, the group spotted a road out.

Back on the main road, they encountered check points along the way. On several occasions they came upon what they thought were check points, but not being sure, they sped right through them.

Then they started seeing the bodies on the road, people their own age who looked like they had been alive minutes earlier. They also began seeing huge plumes of smoke in the distance, which they later learned were from people being burned alive in their homes and cars.

“We came to a point in the road where we see cars abandoned and crashed and bodies in them and bodies around them as if they were trying to run away,” Weinstein recalls. “More and more bodies. We were freaking out.”

They finally arrived back at his cousin’s apartment in Tel Aviv at around 10 a.m. Hours later, they learned that the three people in their party who had traveled in a separate car had survived by hiding under a bush for hours as Hamas terrorists killed people all around them.

Weinstein says that a lot of people in Israel don’t believe they have support in America. They hear only about the anti-Semitism and the hate.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening in North America, on the campuses,” he says. “As a Jew from North America, I never could imagine how comfortable people would be with this level of anti-Semitism and racism.”

But Weinstein says that traveling across the United States and Canada, “I’ve seen a lot of support. I truly believe there’s a lot more support than there is hate.”

Weinstein’s appearance was sponsored by Chabad of Wakefield.
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[This column originally appeared in the September 5, 2024 Wakefield Daily Item.]