The Secret Chord: Leonard Cohen Composes “Hallelujah”

He only began writing songs seriously at the age of 30, and started singing a few years later. A proud Jew who spent time living in a Buddhist monastery in California, he used poetry and music to express both the holiest and the darkest parts of the human soul. His most famous song, whose story we tell here, is likely one you know, even if you've never heard Leonard Cohen sing it in his own voice.

Miryam Zakheim | 11.08.25

Leonard Cohen. Via Wikimedia. CeCILL license

He looked unlike any other rock star as he stepped onto the stage at Glastonbury, the biggest music festival in the world. In a setting full of color and glitter, he was dressed in a neatly pressed gray suit and shirt. On his head was a gray fedora, shading his eyes, which remained half-closed as he sang.

Yet his deep voice resonated more powerfully than any shout.

He sang, calling out to the world: Hallelujah.

The crowd was electrified, held under his spell.

At first there was an almost sacred silence. Then the audience joined in, singing the familiar words with hands raised high. As the dramatic English sunset bathed the stage, they erupted in applause, not the restrained clapping of concert halls, but a jubilant mixture of whistles and shouts.

The 74-year-old singer removed his hat and bowed to the audience with quiet elegance.

The journey to that moment had been a long one.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in the 1930s to an Orthodox Jewish family in Montreal, Canada. His parents gave him the Hebrew name Eliezer, Eliezer ben Nisan HaCohen.

He grew up in a comfortable and privileged environment that allowed him to explore and cultivate his passions: literature, poetry, and music. Did he dream of a career in music? He taught himself a bit of guitar and even formed a band in high school, but by his own account, he was a very mediocre player.

It was only in the early 1960s that he allowed someone else to teach him.

“I was visiting my mother’s house in Montreal”, he recalled during an acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award, “Her house is beside a park and in the park there is a tennis court where many people come to watch the beautiful young tennis players enjoy their sport. I wandered back to this park which I’d known since my childhood, and there was a young man playing a guitar. He was playing a flamenco guitar, and he was surrounded by two or three girls and boys who were listening to him. I loved the way he played. There was something about the way he played that captured me. It was the way that I wanted to play and knew that I would never be able to play.”

After the Spanish guitarist’s impromptu performance, Cohen simply asked if he would be willing to teach him. They communicated in broken French, agreed on a price, and over the next three days the young Spaniard taught the Canadian poet, who was older than him, six guitar chords. On the fourth day, the guitarist did not come.

“I had the number of his, of his boarding house in Montreal. I phoned to find out why he had missed the appointment, and they told me that he had taken his life. That he committed suicide.

I knew nothing about the man. I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he appeared there at that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I was deeply saddened, of course. But […] it was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.”

Leonard Cohen, 1988 01 צילום Gorupdebesanez מתוך ויקיפדיה — Image: Gorupdebesanez

Meanwhile, regardless of his skill on the guitar, Cohen never stopped writing, especially poetry. Words captivated him long before melodies did. In high school, he studied with the poet Irving Layton, who greatly influenced him, and by the time he reached university, he was already writing seriously and winning literary awards.

He lived a fully secular life, but his Jewish identity was always present. It was not a religion he practiced to the letter, but rather a framework of ideas and values that became the foundation for his personal and distinctive spiritual journey.

On a practical level, he maintained a connection to his father’s community synagogue, where he learned to love prayer. He was proud of his family name and all its implications.

Alongside these deep roots, he possessed a curiosity and openness toward other spiritual worlds. From the beginning, his writing was strikingly universal. His first poetry collection was titled Let Us Compare Mythologies.

In the 1950s and 60s, Cohen published several volumes of poetry in quick succession, as well as two novels that received enthusiastic reviews in Canada.

He also composed music for some of his poems, but never dared to do much with it until he met folk singer Judy Collins. They met in New York, and he hesitantly asked if he could play her something, carefully qualifying his request: He explained that he didn’t sing or play very well, and he wasn’t sure if this was even really a song. Then he sat down at the piano, accompanied himself, and sang “Suzanne.”

“Listen,” she said firmly when he finished, “that is really a song, and I am going to record it. Tomorrow.”

It may not have been the very next day, but Collins did record the song and included it on her album In My Life. From then on, she did everything she could to push Cohen into the spotlight. On one occasion, she invited him to a fundraising evening where she herself was performing, and asked the audience to welcome “a writer, a poet, an author, and a wonderful friend.” Even she was not yet calling him a singer.

But when the thirty-something Cohen stepped on stage, fear froze him in place, and the out-of-tune strings on his guitar sealed the performance’s fate. In his deep, quiet voice he said, “I just can’t do it,” and walked offstage. The audience enjoyed this moment of vulnerability, but Collins refused to give up. Later that evening she brought him back onstage with her, and together they performed a kind of impromptu duet of “Suzanne,” marking the first time he had sung the song before a live audience.

Three weeks later, he was already in the studio recording.

In 1967, he arrived in New York, ready for a turning point in his career after failing to make a living as a writer in Canada. He was already 33, and found it hard to get New York agents to take him seriously or even listen. Most of them asked outright: Hey pal, aren’t you a bit too old for this?

Then someone introduced him to producer John Hammond, Columbia Records’ talent scout. “There’s this poet from Canada,” a particularly astute friend told Hammond. “He writes excellent songs, but he can’t read music, and he’s very odd. I don’t think Columbia will like him, but you might.”

And Hammond did. He liked Cohen’s unique style, his seriousness, and above all, the songs themselves. This was the start of a remarkable friendship, and of Cohen’s growing rapport with an audience that was beginning to know and appreciate him. His lyrics were sometimes dark, often melancholic, but carried a fine thread of subtle, sophisticated humor. Before long, his astonishingly deep and distinctive voice became his most striking hallmark.

Even if he still was not filling stadiums, an ever-growing audience eagerly devoured his songs, each of which was really a story in itself. One critic called them “cinematic songs.”

His muses were often more physical than spiritual – real women, flesh and blood, whom he drew close. Some shared long relationships with him, like Marianne Ihlen, whom he likely loved until his death, and Suzanne Elrod, the mother of his children. Others were brief, fleeting encounters, but almost every one inspired a song, or several.

Marianne on the sun-drenched shores of Hydra, Janis Joplin in the corridors of the Chelsea Hotel, Suzanne walking the streets of Old Montreal, and Angie in a Los Angeles studio – wherever he was, there was a woman who became a musical refrain, a lyric, or even an entire album.

הקרדיט על התמונה Babis Mores — Marianne and Leonard, photo: Babis Mores

The way he gave voice to the feelings these women stirred in him led many to see him as a “high priest of love”, especially when that love was broken and full of pain.

His debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in December 1967, earning only modest success in the United States (Americans were still struggling to embrace his overflowing sense of melancholy), but far greater success in Europe, where it quickly entered the music charts.

It was enough for him to want, and be able, to keep recording. Each subsequent album made him more and more famous as the years went on.

But then, just after his first wave of success, and precisely when he was working on the album that would include his most famous song, the American record company rejected it almost dismissively.

Cohen wrote Hallelujah over a period of years – seven or five, depending on whom you ask – but either way, it clearly was not a song that came easily. Entire notebooks filled with hundreds of draft verses piled up, and his frustration only grew.

“I remember being on the floor of the Royalton Hotel [in Manhattan], on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor saying ‘I can’t finish this song,’” he later recalled of the final stage in writing it. He did not believe he would ever manage to turn this work, which had tormented him for so long, into a song.

But he did.

It was 1984, and Cohen was fifty years old.

Columbia Records, however, rejected the album, Various Positions, featuring the song Hallelujah, with the rather presumptuous comment: “We know you’re great. We just don’t know if you’re any good.” In other words: We don’t believe you can reach enough of the American audience, or perhaps – we’re just tired of you.

Leonard Cohen did not give up, releasing the album through a small, little-known label. At first, hardly anyone heard the song, and certainly no one was particularly excited by it. Only when a cover version by John Cale was released, more than five years later, did it begin to gain popularity. Two more cover versions brought about its unprecedented spread (at least by Cohen’s standards at the time) around the world: Jeff Buckley’s version in 1994, and then Cale’s version returning to public attention after being included on the soundtrack of the animated film Shrek.

Years after it was written and recorded, Hallelujah became one of the most frequently played rock songs in the world, with hundreds (some say thousands) of cover versions. It appeared in numerous “songs of the decade” and “songs of the century” lists and rankings. Ironically, the cover versions made it into these lists more often than Cohen’s own recordings, even though he performed the song countless times in concert, changing some of the words and verses over the years.

How did a song by Leonard Cohen, the tortured and sophisticated troubadour, become one of the most famous songs in the world? Was it the title’s unmistakably religious association that captured the public’s imagination, or rather its erotic and romantic plea?

For although the word “Hallelujah” appears repeatedly throughout the song, and although it is full of religious motifs and references to biblical stories (especially those open to controversial interpretations, presenting a complex picture of morality and humanity), this is not a religious song.

Its original title, as it appears in Cohen’s notebook drafts, was The Other Hallelujah.

Cohen, who throughout his life traveled the world, not just in the physical sense but in the realm of ideas and the spirit, wanted to convey to those who had never experienced religious feelings, the elusive sensation expressed in this word of praise for the divine, hallelujah: that inner expansion, that moment when something stirs and calls to you from within.

The hundreds of drafts produced one of Cohen’s most personal songs, not necessarily because of the intimate references to the woman he was writing about. This is most clearly felt in the closing lines of the song, which did not appear in every version:

I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

Throughout his life, before and after he became famous, in his greatest successes and in times of professional decline, when he was passionately in love and when he was desperately lonely and depressed, he was always in the midst of some spiritual search. That search gave his work a unique dimension.

Writing itself was, for him, the greatest experience of his life:

“Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money, nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.”

He wrote about the same experiences everyone wrote about: love and breakups, betrayal and meaningless relationships, pain, beauty, self-discovery, and loneliness. But he did so on a slightly different plane, often declaring, consciously or not, that he had no answers.

There is something greater, he felt and tried to make others feel, whether outside us or within us, and when we encounter it we are filled with that indescribable sensation that makes us cry out, whether we are believers or not, “Hallelujah!”

But what is that great “something”? “I didn’t come to fool you,” he sang.

You will have to find it for yourselves.

***
The closing event of the National Library’s Docutext Documentary Film Festival will take place on August 21, 2025. At its center will be a screening of the film Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, which follows the love story of Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, his 1960s muse to whom he dedicated many of his songs, most famously So Long, Marianne. After the film, there will be a performance by Ivri Lider, who will sing the songs of Leonard Cohen, accompanied by the Israel Camerata Jerusalem.

‘Toyve the Black Cantor’ and His 1930 World Tour

When celebrated African-American Yiddish soloist Thomas Larue crossed the Atlantic, he didn't know what was in store...

Henry Sapoznik | 01.07.21

Gesher L’Europa Historic Jewish Press Historic Press Jewish Music Life Before The Holocaust Music Newspapers Yiddish

Billed as "The greatest wonder in the world", reactions to LaRue's appearances in Europe varied greatly (Poster image source: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Edvin Relkin the 50 year-old promoter of the provocative and attention-grabbing LaRue world tour, worked his way up from a childhood as a Yiddish theater candy butcher to become a leading director. The audacious tour idea seemed to offer unlimited possibilities with a heretofore untapped market: a European audience which had rarely even seen a Black person let alone one who spoke like a native Yiddishist.

After lining up two producers in Poland, Relkin, whom Variety dubbed “The East Side Yiddish showman”, lived up to that appellation and took what was already an eyebrow raising experience – an articulate and accomplished Black man who had mastered singing in Jewish languages and styles – and transformed it into a living musical diorama of Jewish history underscored by the chosen concert itinerary: Palestine, Egypt, Western and Eastern Europe.

“The Greatest Sensation in Europe! Just one concert of the famous American Black Cantor (Negro) Toyvye the Black Cantor in a program of cantorial compositions and Yiddish folk songs.” Advertisement appearing in *Haynt*, 9 October, 1930. From the National Library of Israel Digital Collection

For the tour, Thomas LaRue was transformed into “Toyve Ha’Cohen,” the last part added for its implied “in-your-face” inference of his Jewish priestly lineage. Gone, too, was the story of the inner city child of a single mother who favored the company of Jews, now rebranded with a more colorful creation myth which toggled between: “…a Jew descended from generations of the Ten Lost Tribes in the city of Bet El Set between Abyssinia and Arabia,” (Republika Lodz, November 26, 1930) to his being “…a Shabtis, [a descendant of the followers of the 17th century false messiah, Shabbtai Zvi] with a father who was a healer and made herbal elixirs as did Toyve himself in New York” (Dos Naye Lebn, Bilaystock, October 24, 1930).

In the November 21st edition of Unzer Grodner Express, Ha’Cohen’s father was “…named Petrosi, a very cultured man who was a high official in local Abyssinian government, while his mother Alia, died when he was young.” And in order to explain (however improbably) LaRue’s New Jersey residence, Unzer Grodner Moment Express on November 21 noted that his father “…wanted him to be a fully realized Jew, so he was sent to study with a Russian rabbi in Newark.”

After the initial announcement in the June 1928 issue of Variety, the tour was finally ready to begin.

On September 19, 1930 several Polish Yiddish papers ran the following story:

“Cairo (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) En route to Europe, a concert was given here by the Black Cantor from New York where he is known as ‘Toyve the Black Cantor.’ The Black cantor’s program of cantorial hymns and Yiddish folk songs elicited great interest and his large audiences had many non-Jews.”

Warsaw

The tour’s first European stop was Warsaw, the jewel in the crown of cantorial cities, given its world-renowned synagogues. Warsaw Jewish audiences were tough. Their enthusiastic devotion to cantorial singing split the difference between being about spiritual or esthetic uplift and being an aggressive blood sport.

It was the latter which LaRue would experience at his premier.

In an unsigned October 10 Unzer Express concert review, the author makes clear at the outset (and at the close too, for good measure) that Eddie Rankin’s Polish partners were two “shady characters” who had earlier produced a disastrous cantorial concert leaving angry attendees demanding refunds, with the promoters nowhere to be found. This, then, was the Warsaw community (and Unzer Express) declaring war on the impresarios via the Toyve concert.

Knowing that they had previously been conned by the “shady characters,” everyone figured that the “Black Cantor” was a scam, too.

When LaRue stepped onto the stage, Conservatory Hall was largely empty but for some comped guests, a handful of intrepid curious and the ubiquitous confrontational hecklers in the gallery (at one point, they derisively called out “Sing ‘Sonny Boy!'” referring to the Al Jolson hit of the previous season).

Warsaw Conservatory, early 20th century (Public Domain)

And, despite LaRue not being the primary target of the boycott, the collateral damage he experienced was decisive, resulting in a truncated 50 minute concert with what little audience there was streaming out. It was capped off with a corrosive poison pen hit-piece in Unzer Express chastising LaRue for his stage mannerisms, his cantorial singing being influenced by 78 rpms, and even his Jewishness.

On the Unzer Express humor page, opposite the scathing review, a cartoon (which may appear offensive by today’s standards) continues to jab at the producers accused of booking someone who doesn’t even know how to read from a prayerbook:

“The ‘Cantor’ With His Apprentice. Impresario: Ivan! [shorthand name for a Gentile] Black Man! Turn the prayerbook right-side up. How are you holding it?” Published in the *Unzer Express*, 10 October 1930. From the National Library of Israel Digital Collection

Bialystock

“Toyvele, the Black cantor demonstrated here that the defamation he faced in the pages of a well known Warsaw newspaper was completely without merit.”

So ran the lead line in the October 29 review of LaRue’s Bialystock concert. The paper, Dos Naye Leben (The New Life) had been fans of LaRue’s since 1921 when they re-ran an ecstatic review from New York’s Morgn Zhurnal about LaRue in “Yente Telebende.”

The paper rolled out the red carpet for LaRue giving him three features including an October 24 sit down with their editor:

“…he is a genial young man of not just looks but his speech makes it seem as if the waters of the Jewish Diaspora have cascaded down upon him…”

The writer also deflated the charge in the Warsaw paper about LaRue’s reliance on commercial sound recordings by deftly acknowledging it:

“True, his cantorial prayers sound as if he learned them off phonograph records and lack the burning immediacy of traditional cantorial improvisation, but the same can be said for a hundred percent of modern cantors even those who are currently practicing.”

And finally, a stellar October 29th concert review:

“...the audience gave him several standing ovations not allowing him to go on with the rest of the concert…. He is an unrivaled master worthy of the kind of praise heaped upon opera singers. In bestowing sincerity, honesty and artistic heart in each of his songs, you experience his true artistry.”

Grodno

After appearing in Grodno on October 25th, then traveling to Leipzig and Berlin at the beginning of November, Larue returned to Grodno towards the end of the month amid a flurry of intense local interest, with Unzer Grodner Express (Our Grodno Express) reporting on November 20:

” …the Black cantor arrives here direct from Berlin where his concerts in their largest concert hall generated such a colossal response that he had to increase to 12 his scheduled three concerts… The Berlin music critics were effusive in their praise of the Black cantor in the Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung, Morgen Post and many others. Reviewers were captivated by the concerts so it would stand to reason that in Grodno – where we know a thing or two about cantors – his imminent arrival has generated so much interest.”

The tour ends

Following a performance in Lodz, LaRue would end his European tour where it started in Warsaw, as a guest of the Polish state radio in a concert of cantorial songs, thus having the last word in the city which gave his European tour its terrible start.

There would be a small European coda when LaRue returned to Europe the following year. An Associated Press dispatch in the April 13, 1931 New York Times noted that Toyve Ha’Cohen had just sung at the Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest. Curiously, there appear to be no mentions of LaRue in the New York Times for any of his local New York performances.

In 1936, LaRue’s old employers, Jacobs and Goldberg (for whom he did Dos Khupe Kleyd and Yente Telebende), brought him back to the theater in the drama Di Falshe Tokhter (The False Daughter) at Brooklyn’s Parkway theater, having lost their Harlem Lenox Theater during The Depression. LaRue’s appearance – in a specially created “cabaret” scene – not only made it into the Yiddish press, but was also carried in the October 10th edition of the African-American newspaper The Amsterdam News.

One preview notice for a 1936 New Year’s eve concert and dinner dance at a synagogue in East Orange, New Jersey reveals the kind of complicated dynamic between LaRue and the communities he served. Atypically, LaRue is not singing cantorial and Yiddish music, but leading something called “The Bumble Bees Radio Broadcast Orchestra” and, in a reprise of an appearance at their last New Year party, organized and MC’d a minstrel show replete with “coon shouters” (blues singers).

The last known LaRue appearance is for a December 1953 Hanukah concert in his native Newark.

LaRue remains a cypher, occasionally visible in articles and display ads in period newspapers as a performer but also naggingly invisible there, too as a man.

LaRue inhabited a curious niche within the Jewish community, an uneasy mix of being apart from and a part of it.

Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he attend a synagogue when not performing synagogue music? What did he do between the ever-decreasing Jewish concerts? For that matter, was he even Jewish?

The kind of music culture in which LaRue had invested himself would, in the outwash of the Holocaust, go into a freefall with post-War Jewish audiences for whom the old time florid soloistic cantorial style gave way to milder “congregational singing,” while Yiddish, a major Jewish language and its attendant culture would decline after a majority of its speakers were murdered and its fecund old world communities destroyed.

Thomas LaRue’s final resting place was recently discovered in Linden, New Jersey, yet it is tragic that when he passed away, he certainly may not have been honored in the traditional way, which would have greatly resonated: to the strains of “El Mole Rachamim,” the prayer for the dead, a cornerstone intonation in the traditional cantorial repertoire, and something with which LaRue would have been intimately familiar.

—

A version of this article appeared on Henry Sapoznik’s Research Blog. It appears here as part of Gesher L’Europa, the National Library of Israel’s initiative to connect with people, institutions and communities across Europe and beyond, through storytelling, knowledge sharing and community engagement.

A Musical Gift Left Behind: Remembering Guy Illouz

Guy Illouz, 26, was carving a career in the music business. Hamas terrorists shot Illouz at the Nova festival and kidnapped him to Gaza. Illouz died there of his wounds.

Hillel Kuttler | 14.01.25

Lives Lost: The Works of the October 7 Fallen – A Special Project October 7

When her infant son, Guy Illouz, cried, Doris Liber put on the MTV network and danced with him to the music videos. While crawling, he sometimes moved to the beat. As a boy, he picked at his mother’s guitar; at age 7 he went to an after-school conservatory and continued taking guitar lessons even during summer breaks. In third grade, he wrote his first song. In fourth grade, he began playing electric guitar, too.

“It was incredible. It was something. He was born with a rhythm, that boy,” said Liber, a native of the New York City borough of Queens who today lives in the central Israeli city of Ra’anana.

Illouz served in the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade and studied psychology in college for a bit, but he worked in the music industry as a stagehand, sound specialist and backliner — someone whose many tasks included quickly replacing snapped guitar strings — at concerts of some of Israel’s leading singers and bands.

His love for music is what drew Illouz, 26, to the Tribe of Nova festival, where Hamas terrorists shot him during their October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel’s western Negev. They kidnapped him to the Gaza Strip, where he died at a hospital.

Years have passed since they last worked together, but Moshe Levi continues to feel Illouz’s impact.

Illouz stood out for his willingness to service the musicians and their crews, for his encouragement and for being humble, said Levi, a well-known Israeli pianist and music producer who’s the longtime musical director for songwriter-singer Shalom Hanoch.

“I remember I felt it from the first minute, that you’ve met someone who simply illuminates the place you are in and gives you the feeling you’re the most important, valued person in the world,” Levi said.

Israeli Singer Moti Caspi C. In Gray Jacket With His Crew Including Guy Illouz Standing Far Right Sent By Gis Mother Doris 122924 — Israeli singer Matti Caspi (c. in gray jacket) with his crew, including Guy Illouz (standing, far right), courtesy of Doris Liber

“We’d say how amazing it was that we had him. You could feel the happiness beyond his smile. I’d feel like I was coming to a performance just to meet Guy.”

It was only after Illouz’s death that Liber and some of Guy’s friends discovered numerous songs he composed and played, saved on his phone and laptop. Nearly all were instrumental and untitled.

“He had a sense of music. He’d write lyrics for some songs, but he wrote them for himself without playing them for us,” said Aviv Kobi, Illouz’s friend since nursery school. “It’s a shame he didn’t play them for us.”

Listen to some of Guy’s music in the video below, uploaded to Youtube by his stepfather Shmulik Gritzer:

Most of Illouz’s compositions seemed sad. That’s because “life is imperfections,” his mother quoted him as explaining once. Liber’s marriages to Guy’s father and stepfather ended, her sister committed suicide on the day of Guy’s bar mitzvah and Guy broke up with two girlfriends.

Illouz’s songs “were filled with emotion,” said his stepfather, Shmulik Gritzer. “When he broke up with a girlfriend, you can understand the longing, the emotion.”

Guyhayehudim — An Instagram post on behalf of HaYehudim, an Israeli rock band whom Guy Illouz worked with, marking a year since his abduction.

Illouz sometimes worked alongside Gritzer, who specializes in lighting at concerts. The two had planned a December 2023 trip together to Budapest or Amsterdam. Their last interaction was the night of October 6. Illouz ate dinner at his mother’s home. Gritzer wanted Illouz to stop by to get a guitar strap he’d bought for him, but Illouz was in a hurry to reach the Nova festival. He said he’d fetch it another time.

Music and friendship promise to be Illouz’s legacy.

Beginning in high school, Illouz and his buddies hung out in their neighborhood’s air-raid shelters, which they transformed into clubhouses to chill and play music informally. Plenty of those who didn’t play instruments came by to revel in the camaraderie, too. Illouz and Kobi played guitar, Noam and Yuval were on bass guitar, Daniel drummed, and friends of theirs occasionally popped over to add a trumpet, saxophone and organ to the mix.

The gang would jam and discuss their romances and career plans. They’d go hiking.

“We were all friends. It was a core group,” said Kobi.

Friends Alon Werber L. And Guy Illouz R. Both Murdered At Nova Festival Sent By Gis Mother Doris 122924 — Friends Alon Werber (l.) and Guy Illouz (r.), both murdered by Hamas, courtesy of Doris Liber

A close member of the circle, Alon Werber, was murdered at the Nova festival as he and Illouz sought to escape by car. Another, Almog Sarusi, was kidnapped there and held captive in Gaza until August 2024, when he was among six recently murdered Israelis whose bodies the IDF recovered and returned to Israel for burial.

Liber plans to build a youth club on Ra’anana’s Weizmann Street. City officials approved her proposal in late December 2024.

Guyalmog — Guy Illouz and Almog Sarusi, both murdered by Hamas, courtesy of Doris Liber

Rather than be named for the three young men murdered (Sarusi’s girlfriend, Shahar Gindi, also was murdered), the facility would be called The True Friends.

“It will live on for Guy and his friends,” Liber said. “It is bigger than one person.”

Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.