Amir's Room: how a fallen soldier's music reaches children who never knew him

Sgt. Amir Lavi was born on April 17, 2004, and fell on October 7, 2023, at the Sufa military outpost – 19 years old.

What his family and friends carry forward is not only grief, but the sound and the color of who he was.

Now, through a room full of instruments in Ashkelon, that sound is reaching children who never had the chance to know him.

Amir was born and raised in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood and attended IASA High School, where he majored in art.

Painting and drawing were inseparable from who he was, forming a kind of mosaic of his life and his development into his own identity.

Music sat alongside art as Amir’s other great love. He moved between genres most people treat as opposites, always curious – though more than any of them, he loved rock, for its rawness and its refusal to make things smaller than they were.

He wasn’t a passive listener; he needed to understand a song fully – who wrote it, what they meant – before it was truly his.

He played guitar constantly; not as a performance, but as a way of thinking out loud. That habit didn’t stop when he put on a uniform: hours before he fell, he was still playing guitar with fellow soldiers at the outpost.

Above everything, Amir was a people person, with a gift for seeing someone exactly for who they were, without judgment. He was also a man of values – a true Zionist who chose to serve as a combat soldier in the Nahal Brigade’s 50th Battalion, treating his service as a privilege rather than an obligation.

What made him unusual was how many (sometimes contradictory) sides of himself he held together at once – the painter and the soldier, the metalhead and the lover of Mizrahi (Eastern) music – without conflict.

Amir fell on October 7, fighting alongside his friends in a battle now remembered as heroic – one that, through their resistance that day, spared many civilian lives. He was a beloved son to Rachel and Elad, a wonderful brother to his sister, Tamar, and a cherished grandson and cousin. He is missed, and he always will be.

For Amir’s parents, grief asked for a way to keep their son’s languages – music and art – alive, and to put them in the hands of children who could use exactly what Amir had: a place to feel something, to be understood without needing to explain.

Out of that need, they founded Amutat Amir – a nonprofit whose name is an acronym for omanut, musika, yetzira, ruah (art, music, creation, and spirit) – dedicated to creating spaces where children can pick up an instrument the way Amir once picked up his guitar, almost instinctively.

The first of these spaces has already opened. In partnership with Orr Shalom, Amutat Amir dedicated a fully equipped music room inside a group home in Ashkelon, built with support from Bank Hapoalim. A sign outside simply reads “Amir’s Room.” The room now serves 12 children who live there – kids for whom stability has often been in short supply.

Orr Shalom, the organization that runs the group home in Ashkelon, has spent more than four decades doing some of the hardest work in Israeli society: caring for children removed from their biological homes after severe neglect, abuse, or family collapse.

Founded in 1980, it is today the country’s leading nonprofit in the field, caring for well over 1,000 children and young adults, from infancy through their mid-20s, across foster families and therapeutic group homes nationwide.

Its work has been recognized with Israel’s Presidential Award for Volunteerism and UN advisory status – but its daily reality is about the slow, patient work of helping a child who has known instability learn, sometimes for the first time, what safety feels like.

That is precisely where music comes in. Research on trauma-informed care consistently finds that children who have lived through abuse, neglect, or repeated loss often struggle to put what happened to them into words – and pushing them to talk before they’re ready can do more harm than good.

Music offers another way in. Making it, or even just listening with someone who’s paying attention, has been shown to ease anxiety and stress, help regulate emotions that otherwise feel unmanageable, and rebuild a sense of connection and trust that trauma tends to erode.

For children who have had little control over their own circumstances, picking up an instrument – deciding what to play, how loud, how fast – can restore a small, real sense of agency. Group music-making adds another layer: shared rhythm and shared sound create belonging without requiring a shared story.

That is what makes Amir’s Room more than a nice gesture. It gives 12 children in Ashkelon a space built for the kind of wordless expression Amir relied on himself. He never met them. But the instinct he had to reach for a guitar rather than a sentence when something needed saying is now something they can reach for, too.

Amir was an artist, a musician who researched every song until he’d earned the right to love it, a soldier who served with pride and fell defending others, and, above all, a friend who made people feel truly seen.

Now, in an Orr Shalom group home in Ashkelon, children are growing up with a music room that exists because Amir existed first. They may not have known him. But they will know what he knew: that a room with instruments in it is a room where something in you is allowed to come out – passed forward, one chord at a time.