Aner Shapiro was a hero on Oct. 7, a cold comfort for his grieving parents

PUBLISHED: November 24, 2025 | www.baltimoresun.com

JERUSALEM — Before the word “Nova” became forever associated with their family name, Moshe and Shira Shapiro insist they were simply a regular Jerusalem family. They live in the city with their seven children; they work ordinary jobs.

But on the morning of Oct. 7th, 2023, the actions of their firstborn child, Aner Shapiro, would eventually make them a household name in Israel, and their son’s name synonymous with “hero.” The Shapiros spoke to The Baltimore Sun, which is documenting some of the aftermath of the attacks from Israel. (Go to baltimoresun.com for video of the conversation.)

On Shabbat morning, they went to synagogue as usual. Still, they both felt something was very wrong.

Shira wanted to call her son because she was sure his commander would soon summon him back to his elite Israel Defense Forces unit near Gaza.

“I wanted to call him to say good luck,” Shira said.

“He was still a soldier in reserves, his base is near Gaza, on the border, so I was sure that in a few minutes or hours he would go back to his base and start protecting us. I wanted to call him and say, ‘I love you.’ But it was Shabbat. We are religious, and we don’t talk on phones, we don’t watch TV, we don’t use cell phones, we don’t use electricity. So I didn’t call. Then I told myself, ‘this is a special situation.’ Even in Jewish law there are exceptions, and I felt this was one of them. So around 10 in the morning, I decided to call anyway.

‘His phone was off,” Shira said.

At 11 a.m., still amid the isolation of no electronics on Shabbat, Aner’s girlfriend too broke with tradition and called to ask if Moshe or Shira had spoken to him. It was then, for the first time, Shira heard that terrorists had infiltrated the Nova festival.

In that instant, Shira says, she understood what had happened to her son.

She began to scream: “No, no, no, it can’t be, it’s not happening,” and continued for nearly an hour. It would take five more days before the army came to their door with formal confirmation that, at 8:30 a.m., long before any of these phone calls, their son had already been killed.

Those five days were spent reeling in the tragedy. But amid the grief, their phones began to ring. On Monday, a survivor from the shelter where their son had been hiding called them and said, “Your son is a hero. Thanks to your son, we’re alive.”

On Tuesday, another survivor called; on Wednesday and Thursday, more followed.

Each told parts of the same story. Their son had stood by the doorway of the shelter, calming people, telling them the army would come. For about half an hour, the family was told, approximately 20 Hamas terrorists tried to storm that small structure, and their son stood as a human barrier between the attackers and the people behind him.

Over that period of time, eight grenades were tossed into the tight enclosure, and each one Aner picked up and threw out of the structure. It was the eighth that exploded in his hand, killing him.

“A young man with values against weapons,” Moshe said of his son.

Moshe, when asked about his son’s character, admits to a kind of envy. He described Aner has having an instinctive sense of leadership and fearlessness in the face of authority.

“For him, there was no halfway,” Moshe says. “He followed his values and gave everything for them.”

The final time they saw their son alive was during a holiday meal. They had just moved into a new apartment, and for the first time in a long time all seven children were home together.

Before the meal, Aner, their eldest son stood with Moshe in the kitchen, looking around the freshly arranged space and remarking on how beautiful the house had turned out. Shira remembers the evening as “not only nice and happy, but perfect.”

At the end of the night, he told them he wanted to go to the Nova music festival with friends, in part to celebrate a birthday. His parents were slightly sad to see him go, only because the family time had been so special, but they blessed him as they blessed all their children, using traditional biblical words that speak of peace and protection.

During the shiva, when people came to offer condolences, Moshe and Shira repeated the “unbelievable” story the survivors had told them. They sensed, however, that many were skeptical, likely assuming that grieving parents might exaggerate their child’s courage.

Yet, weeks later, footage from a nearby car camera was released and shared with the entire nation, and a visual record confirmed what survivors had been saying all along: Aner had, indeed, thrown grenade after grenade away from the terrified crowd.

“We told them, ‘We already knew,’” Shira says of those who suddenly began to call him a hero. “They said, ‘Yes, but we didn’t believe you. It was unbelievable.’”

The grief that followed is something neither parent has mastered. Shira says plainly that no parent is ever prepared for such a thing, and that even after two years, she does not accept it and does not know if she ever will.

Aner was both an elite soldier and a musician. After his death, the music released in his name has reached an international scale, with so many finding comfort and inspiration in it. Moshe, looking for a way to explain this continued impact, compares his son to the stars.

“When you navigate at sea, the stars show you the way. But you know that most of the stars we see don’t exist anymore. They collapsed into themselves millions of years ago, yet their light still exists. You can still navigate according to the light of the stars,” Moshe said. “The light stays, even when the stars don’t exist anymore, and it keeps going for millions of years. There are people like that — their light keeps going, even if they’re not with us.”

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also a part-owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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