On October 8, 2023, just 24 hours after his niece was murdered and Tsachi was taken hostage, Adam, 51, witnessed in Brighton “on the streets of my own city, five minutes from my house, people speaking through a megaphone praising my family’s murderers”.
He saw and filmed a student allegedly praising the actions of the terror group, for which she was arrested and charged with a terrorism charge.
“I knew then that I wasn’t going down without a fight. That drives me to this day,” he says. Adam and Heidi, who were married in 2002 and have been living in Brighton for 16 years, describe October 7 as the “destruction” of their old selves and the beginning of “a new life”, one filled with a “clarity and purpose” previously unknown to them.
For Adam, what came from that experience was the “genesis of a whole new world view, paradigm, identity, orientation, purpose, heart and soul”.
Tsachi Idan (Picture: Alamy)Alamy Stock Photo
Speaking on Sunday evening at a memorial service organised for the Brighton Jewish community to mourn Tsachi, which was attended by more than 120 people, Adam said that October 7 had shown him that he had previously “wasted away the years on my adolescent naivety”.
Heidi, 52, adds that October 7 was “when we saw the truth, and nothing will ever be the same. We can no longer look away.”
Brighton has, in the months since the terrorist atrocities, been a hotbed of anti-Israel controversies, hosting numerous Palestinian rallies featuring imagery and slogans associated with Hamas.
The memorial for victims of October 7 has been vandalised and the city’s purportedly apolitical Pride parade in August last year, which featured Palestinian flags and inverted red triangles, was accused of being a Hamas “haven”.
The CST has reported a significant rise in antisemitic incidents in the city since October 2023. Heidi says they have felt strongly the need to “counteract” those forces in the city through their own vocal and visible campaigns. “We needed to be in the street also, telling the real story of Hamas and advocating for truth and for humanity.”
When she was still a hostage, a photo of British-Israeli Emily Damari is projected onto the Brighton cliffs by the Yellow Ribbon Campaign. (Photo: Nikki Greco)[Missing Credit]
With cross-denominational Jewish communal support, Heidi and Adam have arranged numerous initiatives, including projecting the faces of the hostages onto the cliffs of Brighton, unfurling a massive yellow ribbon along the seafront and releasing 101 lanterns into the night sky when there were still that number of hostages in Gaza.
They have also overseen the creation of a public memorial to the British victims of October 7 in Palmeira Square, central Brighton.
Beside the memorial, made up of photographs and continually cared for flowers, the community hosts a daily evening vigil honouring a different victim or hostage. Heidi and Adam believe the memorial, which is in walking distance from synagogues of all three major Jewish denominations in the city, is the world’s only daily vigil for the cause outside of Israel.
The memorial for British victims of October 7 in Palmeria Square, Brighton (Credit: Daniel Ben-David)[Missing Credit]
The memorial has drawn together all corners of the city’s Jewish community, which numbers more than 2,500, and both the chief rabbi and Progressive Jewish co-leaders have led services.
“Our aim is to bring Jews together,” says Adam. “The hostages unite our entire community. Around this humanitarian issue, we can put our differences aside and find the threads of commonality that build a tapestry of Jewish communal life that transcends the divisions.”
Speaking on Sunday at Tsachi’s memorial at Brighton’s community and cultural centre (BNJC), which was one of the most well-attended events since the centre opened two years ago, Rabbi Andrea Zanardo from Brighton & Hove Reform Synagogue lauded Heidi and Adam for “unifying what is an often fractious and divided” community.
“We are a notoriously quarrelsome lot,” he said. “Heidi, Adam, you have made a miracle. You have motivated the most complacent among us to go public, to literally go on the streets and campaign, and by doing so, to be proudly, uncompromisingly Jewish and Zionist.”
Memorial ceremony for Israeli former hostage Tsachi Idan (Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)Getty Images
Heidi and Adam recently returned from attending Tsachi’s funeral in Israel, which they said was a “powerful” experience. They describe being in Israel as a place where their “whole persons are expanded”, surrounded by a “whole country who cares”.
“We were able to be ourselves there in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time,” Heidi said. “When we’re here in the UK, we tend to contract, so that was a really strange, beautiful impact of being there for such a sad reason, that it had this really positive effect of just feeling normal.”
Tsachi’s funeral was held in a sports stadium, organised by the Hapoel Tel Aviv football team, and the stands were full of friends, family, and strangers who came to grieve for him. Photographs of Tsachi, and of his daughter, Mayan, were displayed on boards and posters across the stadium and on giant LED screens.
The crowd, all wearing red to honour Tsachi’s love for the club, all sang together “in a very mournful, sad way.”
When Tsachi’s family spoke, the “waves of pain would just emanate from them and go through the crowd, and we were all connected; united by this really raw, visceral and physical, sobbing grief,” Heidi said. “I had never been part of something like that before, it was deeply, deeply profound. It was overwhelming.”
Tsachi Idan's mother, Devorah (centre), during a memorial ceremony for him organised by the Hapoel Tel Aviv football team, February 28, 2025 (Credit: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)Getty Images
The stadium ceremony marked the beginning of Tsachi’s final journey, which ended in a procession that Heidi and Adam were a part of, to Kibbutz Einat where he was buried alongside Mayan. Along that route, hundreds more people lined the streets to pay their respects.
“It was like Tsachi was a king or something,” Heidi said. “The hostages and victims of October 7 are so treasured and revered there.”
Despite the pair admitting to being “very tired” after nearly a year and a half of campaigning and fraught emotions, and their own personal chapter of the hostages story coming to a close with the death of Tsachi, they say that “the fight continues”.
As Adam says: “We’re using the trauma that we’ve experienced as a family to try to fuel our desire to prevent it from ever, ever happening again.”
Adam Ma'anit and Heidi Bachram in front of the memorial to the British victims of October 7, in Palmeira Square, Brighton (Credit: Daniel Ben-David)[Missing Credit]
Adam Ma’anit will be interviewed by Angela Epstein while appearing on a panel alongside Jake Wallis Simons and Louise Ellman at the JC’s upcoming event Championing Israel in north Manchester on March 27.
To book, go to: go.thejc.com/championingisrael
