The booing was a gift: Yuval Raphael on Nova, healing and Eurovision

Three years after the Nova festival massacre, Yuval Raphael is going back to Re'im to sing at the memorial, on the ground where she survived eight hours in a roadside shelter. In between, she represented Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, where parts of the crowd booed her. She calls the booing a gift.

Yonit Levi sat down with her for Unholy Conversations in the week of the third anniversary. Yonit interviews alone on this episode. The conversation covers the shelter, the question Raphael put to a social worker from her hospital bed, why she now tells her story abroad rather than at home, and the two rules she offers a country still learning how to grieve.

Two rules for a country in trauma

Israelis are asking for emotional first aid in record numbers, and Raphael has two rules for them. The first is to seek help, always, and to sit with people whose stories look like yours. The second is the one she is more insistent about: do not fight what you feel.

"Please don't fight. Don't fight what you're feeling. Don't fight your emotions. Let them be."

Positive psychology over a wound that size, she says, is a band-aid, and the wound goes infected underneath.

"With emotions it's a surgery without numbing anything. So you might cry a lot and you might feel extra than what you felt before, but this is a way to healing."

It is advice she took herself. She spent the first year and a half after the massacre inside her emotions, turning down her family's suggestions to study, work or travel, and says that pause is the reason she is where she is now.

The question from the hospital bed

From her hospital bed after the shelter, Raphael asked her mother to bring a social worker. She had one question: what do I do now so that this stays a trauma and never becomes post-trauma. The answer was to tell the story, over and over, until the blank spaces shrink.

She is still telling it. On the episode she describes the shelter at Re'im from underneath, in her own words. That testimony belongs in her voice, and we have not summarised it here.

Not the convinced

When she came home from hospital and opened social media, she saw the internet blaming Israel for 7 October. It scared her, she says, to her bones, and taught her that, in her words, we are not protected anywhere now.

Her response was a decision about audiences. Convincing the convinced was never the point. She skipped the rooms in Israel that already agreed and took the story to people who did not: ambassadors, once the United Nations, and above all classrooms. Gen Z, she argues, runs the media and is the most exposed to the lies about that day. Meetings booked for twenty minutes ran to three hours. Watching one listener's eyes change was enough, she says, to make her tell it again.

What Basel gave back

Three months of Eurovision rehearsal had turned her, she says, into a robot, so disconnected from her own song that she feared the camera would show it. Then the booing started.

"They just reconnected me to everything I was so frightened to not have on that stage. So they actually did me a lot of justice with that, in a very odd way."

Yonit called it a blessing in disguise. Raphael agreed.

Back to Re'im

This week she sings at the Nova memorial, where she says the bereaved families give her more strength than she gives them.

"I know to them, I give them strength, but they give me strength more than they know."

A girl once afraid to sing outside her own bedroom now gets to sing in the place where, as she puts it, she was reborn. The question she leaves with Yonit is what the day did to her whole generation, and whether a cohort of twenty-year-olds who learned trauma this way becomes better at helping everyone else through theirs. The full conversation is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.