On October 7, the murder of a Montreal native leaves a gaping hole

MONTREAL – Raquel Ohnona Look wipes away tears as she looks at the plaque honoring her son Alexandre, mounted on a bench in a suburban Montreal park that was recently renamed after him.

“Forever in our hearts. Our Hero,” is written above his name and the dates of his birth and death – September 10, 1990 to October 7, 2023.

Alexandre Look, a 33-year-old Montreal native, was among the concertgoers murdered at the Supernova music festival a year ago Monday during a brutal attack on Israel by Hamas militants. He is among at least eight people, either Canadian citizens or with ties to Canada, who died in the Oct. 7 attacks.

“It was a tough year. It's a new reality. Our family dynamic has changed,” Ohnona Look said in an interview last week just before Rosh Hashanah. “Obviously he was such a big personality and we will never be the same people we were before October 7th.”

The day was every parent's worst nightmare as Ohnona Look and her husband Alain watched their son's final moments from their home in Montreal. They were having a video call with Alexandre as the Hamas attack unfolded and he huddled in a shelter with about 30 other concertgoers.

His mother heard the shots and dropped the phone in shock. His father picked it up to understand what was happening. When he heard the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar,” he knew her son was gone.

Ohnona Look says a year later, the emotions come in waves. “There is a hole in the heart. It's anger. It's trauma because, you know, when a child is murdered and you're on the phone… you can't come back from that.”

Over the past year, she spent many hours trying to find out the circumstances of her son's death by speaking to survivors in the bunker.

“He was a hero that day,” she says she learned. “He sacrificed his life.” He stood in front of the shelter where they were hiding,” she says. Survivors described how their son tried to keep his spirits up while the terrorist attack unfolded around them.

During their video call, he did the same for his mother, trying to comfort her, asking about holiday food and keeping his tone upbeat. She even heard him trying to reason with the attackers. “But you can’t reason with monsters,” she says.

During a recent meeting with a first responder who was tending to Look's body, she was able to fill in some of the gaps that had been haunting her. The first responder said Look was found at two people he was trying to protect at the front of the shelter and he fired most of the shots and grenades. Many survived by hiding further back in the shelter.

“But we know this is Alex and he would have done this a hundred times,” she says. “He was always guided by his fearless, huge heart. That’s how he lived his life.”

She says Look was a natural salesman who spoke six languages. He most recently lived in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and sold cosmetics. He was on vacation in Israel.

After his death, the Look family moved from a nearby Montreal neighborhood back to Côte-St-Luc, a predominantly Jewish suburb where the newly renamed Alexandre Look Place is located. It is next to the Jewish high school he attended and near the synagogue where his father prays every morning.

The community mourned with the family and still does. During an interview with The Canadian Press, at least a dozen people, including strangers, stopped to offer hugs, condolences and wishes for a happy new year.

Now she wants to ensure that those killed on October 7 are not forgotten – the victims she calls the “Nova Angels” from the music festival, as well as those murdered on her kibbutz.

They include Judih Weinstein Haggai, 70, who held Canadian, Israeli and American citizenship. She died on October 7 while walking with her husband near Kibbutz Nir Oz, less than two miles from the Gaza Strip. Their bodies were being held in Gaza and had not been recovered, her daughter said.

Vivian Silver, 74, died on the Be'eri kibbutz where she lived, which is also near the Gaza border. For weeks, officials initially believed the Winnipeg-born woman had been taken to Gaza, but her body was identified in mid-November.

Others found dead immediately after the attack included Look and another Canadian, Ben Mizrachi, 22, of Vancouver.

Hamas also killed Israeli-Canadian dual national Netta Epstein, 21; Shir Georgy, 22; and Adi Vital-Kaploun, 33. Tiferet Lapidot, 22, an Israeli whose family came from Canada, was also at the music festival and was found dead days later.

Emotions remain high, but Ohnona Look says she is in “warrior mode” in the fight against rising anti-Semitism and speaking for those still missing.

“I do what my son would expect of me,” says Ohnona Look. “I am the voice of all the forgotten, the hostages that remain… even if there are only bodies, we need their bodies back.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 6, 2024.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press