Raquel Onona Luke wipes away tears when she sees the plaque in honor of her son Alexandre, affixed to a bench in a green space in a suburb of Montreal that was recently renamed after him.
“Forever in our hearts. ‘Our Hero’,” reads above his name and the date of his birth and death – September 10, 1990 to October 7, 2023.
Alexandre Luke, a 33-year-old Montreal native, was among the attendees killed a year ago at the Supernova music festival during a brutal attack on Israel carried out by Hamas gunmen. He is among at least eight people, either Canadian citizens or with ties to Canada, who died during the October 7 attacks.
“It’s been a tough year. It’s a new reality. Our family dynamic has changed,” Ahnona Luke said in an interview last week, just before Rosh Hashanah. “Obviously he was a huge figure, and we will never go back to the same people we were before 7 October.”
It was any parent’s worst nightmare today, as Onona Luke and her husband, Alan, witnessed their son’s final moments from their home in Montreal. They were on a video call with Alexander when the Hamas attack began and he gathered in a shelter with about 30 other party attendees.
His mother heard the gunfire and dropped the phone in shock. His father picked him up, trying to understand what was happening. When he heard the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar,” he knew their son was gone.
Ohnona Look says after a year, emotions come in waves. “It’s a hole in the heart. It’s anger. It’s trauma, because, you know, a child being killed and you’re talking on the phone…it’s something you can’t come back from.”
She spent many hours over the past year trying to find out the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, speaking to survivors who were in the hideout.
“He was a hero that day,” she says. “He sacrificed his life. He put himself at the front of the shelter where they were hiding,” she says. Survivors described her son trying to keep up their morale as the terrorist attack unfolded around them.
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He did the same with his mother during the video call, trying to keep her comfortable, asking about holiday meals and keeping his tone upbeat. She even heard him trying to reason with the attackers. “But you can’t reason with monsters,” she says.
In a recent meeting with one of the responders who attended Luke’s body, she was able to fill in some of the gaps that had been haunting her. The first responder said Luke was found on top of two people he tried to protect at the front of the shelter, and he had taken most of the gunshots and grenades. Many survived by hiding further in the shelter.
“But we know this is Alex, and he would have done this more than 100 times,” she says. “He was always led by his giant, brave heart. That’s how he lived his life.”
She says Luke was a born salesman who spoke six languages. He was most recently living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and selling cosmetics. He was in Israel on vacation.
After his death, Locke’s family moved from a nearby Montreal neighborhood back to Côte Saint-Luc, a predominantly Jewish suburb where the newly renamed Place Alexandre Locke was located. It is located next to the Jewish high school he attended and near the synagogue where his father prayed every morning.
The community has mourned the family and continues to do so. During an interview with The Canadian Press, at least a dozen people, some of them strangers, stopped to offer hugs, condolences and wishes for a happy new year.
Now she wants to make sure those killed on October 7 are not forgotten – the victims she calls the “Nova Angels” from the music festival as well as those killed on their kibbutzim.
Among them is Jude Weinstein Haggai, 70, who holds Canadian, Israeli and American citizenship. She died on October 7 while on a walk with her husband near Kibbutz Nir Oz, located less than three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. Their daughter said that their bodies were being held in Gaza and had not been recovered.
Vivian Silver, 74, died in Kibbutz Be’eri where she lived, which is also located near the border with Gaza. 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 Luke and another Canadian, Ben Mizrahi, 22, of Vancouver.
Hamas also killed two Canadian-Israeli citizens, Netta Epstein (21 years old); Cher Georgi (22); and Adi Vital Kaplun, 33 years old. Tiferet Lapidot, 22, an Israeli whose family is from Canada, was also at the music festival and was found dead days later.
Emotions remain raw, but Ohnona Look says she is in “warrior mode” in the battle against rising anti-Semitism and speaking out on behalf of those still missing.
“I do what my son wants me to do,” Onona Luke says. “I am the voice of all the forgotten, the hostages who are still trapped… Even if there are only bodies, we need to get their bodies back.”
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
