By Emily Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief
As Maya and Itay Regev spoke at Yeshiva University, silence fell over the hundreds of students that filled Koch Auditorium. A shrilling scream coming from a recording reverberated throughout the room.
“Father, they shot me. Father, they shot me,” the voice in the recording said (translated from Hebrew). “Father, he’s killing us. Father, he’s killing us.”
The piercing scream left the audience visibly shaken. The recording was of a phone call between Maya and her father on Oct. 7 as terrorists shot at a car with the Regev siblings inside.
“What’s happening? Where are you? Try to leave,” their father said. “We can’t leave,” Maya responded, screaming. Her father answered, “Stop crying. Wait. I’m coming in your direction right now, send your location, send your location… I’m coming now.” That’s where the recording ended.
Oct. 7: “a complete nightmare”
On September 26, Maya and Itay Regev, two siblings who were taken hostage by Hamas terrorists and released separately in November 2023 as part of a hostage deal, spoke on the YU Beren campus, joined by their father Ilan Regev. They are just three of the many Israelis affected by that day that have shared their harrowing accounts with the YU community.
“It’s not easy for us to hear it [the recording of the phone call] every time we talk about it, but we feel it’s important [for] people to hear it, to really understand what happened on that same day,” Maya said.
“It was a complete nightmare.”
Maya and Itay were at the Nova Music Festival when they heard rocket sirens at 6:29 AM and ran for about an hour and a half. Their friend Ori Danino called, asking them to share their location, and drove into the fire to bring them and others to safety. That’s when Maya called her father.
A truck full of terrorists attacked the car and started shooting at the passengers. Maya and Itay were both shot in their legs and according to Maya, inside Gaza five minutes later. Danino was also taken captive and murdered in Gaza 11 months later, his body recovered by IDF soldiers in September.
“I am going to bury two children”
Their father took his gun and drove straight towards Re’im. “He drove there in a realization that he’s going to bury two kids,” Maya said. Maya was worried that her father was killed on that day and did not know what happened to him until she was released back into Israel.
In captivity, Maya and Itay were taken to a tunnel, a hospital, and a civilian home. Terrorists tried to remove the bullet from Itay’s leg with tweezers and without any anesthesia, screaming threats at him to be quiet or risk being killed. Six centimeters of Maya’s bone were crushed and the terrorists only performed surgery to take the bullet out of her leg eight days later.
Ilan Regev saw a video of Itay in the back of a Hamas truck, which gave him hope that his children were alive. “As a father,” he said, “I felt that I [was] going to bury two children.” Ilan did everything so that people “not just in Israel” but “all over the world” would know about Maya, Itay, and all the other hostages.
Maya reiterated, “For my parents, through all that time, they did tons of interviews, just everything in their power so we will get home,” she said. “Just keep talking about and do everything in your power not to forget them [the remaining 101 hostages] and to help the families get their loved ones back home.” Maya noted that their friend Omer Shem-Tov is being held hostage by Hamas.
“These are experiences that will change us”
Hearing accounts from those who were in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is extremely important to YU students. “We develop more personal relationships with those we hear stories about. Their faces, or their mothers’ crying faces, become etched in our thoughts as we say Tehillim and learn for their sake,” Eliana Diamond (SCW ‘25) told the YU Observer. “As we listen to their stories, another neshama is lit in our memories and tefilot.”
Diamond continued, “YU is the face of American Jewry, and when we show up for Israel and its people, we show them that America cares.”
YU President Ari Berman addressed students as the Regevs finished speaking. “There is not a day, there is not a minute, we [at] Yeshiva University, where we’re not thinking of our brothers and sisters in captivity,” President Berman said. “This is deeply personal, and you are truly our family.”
He continued, “We have to make sure that ‘Bring Them Home Now’ is not a banner, but it is etched in our hearts and guides our actions.”
A documentary about the Regev siblings’ captivity was produced by Uvda, an investigative Israeli T.V. channel, and a clip was shown to students at YU. The film has been nominated for a 2024 Emmy award.
As the Regevs left YU, students trickled out of Koch Auditorium and made their way back to class. Rabbi Azriel Fine told the YU Observer that it’s important that the YU community “keep the situation centered in our mind.”
“Be’ezrat Hashem, when this is all over, when there’s peace,” he said, “we should be changed and we should be different people from the experiences that we’ve had… from the impact of hearing these stories and having met these people who we never would have met otherwise.”
He continued, “These are experiences that will change us, the people that we are, long beyond this conflict.”
Photo Caption: (from left to right) Ilan, Maya, and Itay Regev addressing students at YU
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University