Israeli artist Moran Stela Yanai arrived in the Negev desert with thousands of people on Oct. 6 for the Nova Music Festival — not to party, but because she thought the concert would be a good place to market her handmade jewelry.

At 6:30 a.m. the next morning, a blistering rocket attack sent some revelers fleeing the site. But Yanai and many others stayed, not knowing where to go or assuming the attack would end.

That was a horrific mistake, as it turned out.

This past Wednesday, a crowd of 300 at Congregation BMH-BJ synagogue in Denver heard Yanai — who was among about 250 Israelis and other nationalities taken hostage by Hamas near the Gazan border — recount the humiliation she endured over the next 54 days, .

An estimated 1,200 people, including 43 Americans died in the Oct. 7 assault.

Two months later, Yanai was one of 80 hostages freed as part of a brief ceasefire deal — the only large-scale release of captives that has taken place.

Of the remaining group, about 100 are estimated to remain in captivity; many are assumed dead.

Two weeks ago, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six hostages, including an American, from a tunnel in south Gaza. The victims appeared to have been shot execution-style.

Yanai, 41, told the Denver audience that, during her captivity, she feared daily she would be killed.

At the festival site, she hid in a tree with four others when Hamas militants discovered her. Her fall from the perch left her with three leg fractures. She said she passed from one group of attackers to another — they stripped bracelets, necklaces and other merchandise from her, she said.

She was loaded in a car with 10 captors and sped over the border into Gaza, where crowds cheered the returning militants.

After a hospital trip where her leg was splinted, she was moved between several homes in the following weeks. Yanai had been dressed in green at the festival, which she said led to her interrogations pressing her whether she was in the Israeli Defense Forces. She cried repeatedly during the earliest days, but was later warned to show no emotion, not even weeping, during captivity.

To the Denver crowd she recounted no direct allegation of sexual assault, as some other hostages have now relayed. But she said the threats were implicit, including “examinations” she endured when being moved between sites, and references she took from listening in on her captors’ conversations.

She recalled being under constant surveillance, often forbidden to speak or even move. She endured a beating, and at one point had a gun pressed to her head after she attempted a laugh at a captor’s taunts.

Meanwhile, Yanai said she lost half of her hearing during bombing attacks and endured lice infestations, food poisoning and severe dehydration.

After her release, she recalled, she had lost 12% of her body weight and had to relearn how to walk, use the sink, shower and brush her teeth.

Under the relentless deprivations, Yanai found moments to say “thank you” — inwardly — for what she described as minor miracles, including waking dehydrated but alive in the morning and making it through to midday.

The most difficult denial, she recalled, was being forbidden to cry or otherwise express any emotion.

When ceasefire talks in late November brought the possibility of release, she was told one day she would be in a release group, then was denied at the last minute, but finally was included in another release.

Her small group of captives was forbidden to show discontent during the final moments before being taken over the border into Egypt. When she saw they had crossed the frontier, she allowed herself a long, enduring scream.

Many hours later, the return to Israel was like being reborn, she recalled.

Crowds were on the street at 3:30 a.m., many of them in pajamas, to welcome the captives home.

Asked by a member of the Denver audience whether she now feels safe, she replied, “No.”

“Today, I have to learn to be safe again,” she said. “If this Nova story doesn’t end differently, then no one is safe.”

When asked what peace looks like from her perspective, Yanai replied that she had grown up in a neighborhood where Israelis of many persuasions, including Arabs, had lived peacefully side-by-side.

But now, she said, she now feels peace is an abstract.

“I will think back about peace when all of the other (hostages) are home,” she said.

“I have a mission, an obligation,” she added. “I will do anything in my power to bring them back.”

Yanai’s visit to Denver — the event was hosted by Chabad Jewish Center of South Metro Denver — occurred at a moment when the conflict appears to be cresting, as Israeli forces move into Hamas-controlled areas along the Egyptian border, with claims and counterclaims about civilian casualties, and as war now flairs up along Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria.

What does Yanai say to Americans at such a moment?

“I’m a very non-political person,” Yanai told The Denver Gazette. “I just want to get up in the morning feeling free.

“You really need to think carefully about the agenda they put on the table. Check facts, both sides, not just the ones you agree with,” she added. 

Of Yanai, Rabbi Yaakov Chaitovsky at BMH-BJ told The Denver Gazette, “She is a thoughtful, articulate profile in courage who shared just enough of her story to make us wince, cry and shake our heads in bewilderment.”

Yanai remembers other hostages, both men and women, she had met during her ordeal who hadn’t come back, she said.

That, she said, leaves her plagued by questions.

“Why me?”

“Why did I survive?”

“I got to go home. I got to see my mother and father.”