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. Hamas continues to hold his body hostage.
Nearly five 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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 [email protected].
