Thirteen months on, the story is “sad but there’s some optimism to it”, according to Netta Epstein’s mother. Netta, 22, was living at Kfar Aza with his fiancée, 22-year-old Irene Shavit, when Hamas attacked on October 7.

The couple hid for hours in their safe room, texting his mother who was in a house on the other side of the kibbutz. Then a terrorist hurled a grenade into the room and opened fire. Netta, a former paratrooper, smothered the explosion with his body.

He was killed instantly but his heroism saved Irene, who hid under his body in the dark until the IDF arrived.

Netta and Irene

He was one of five family members his mother, Ayelet Epstein, lost on October 7. Yet she is able to take some hope from that awful day. “He was with the woman he loved most and he made a decision that really made a change,” she said. “He was able to do something and save a life. We love Irene as if she’s a daughter.” The couple had only met the previous April but quickly fell in love and decided to get married the following year. “I thought they were too young for that,” Ayelet said.

She was speaking with incredible calm and eloquence among the rubble of the kibbutz, exactly a year after those terrible events. The occasion was the first tasting of a special whisky called Netta’s Story (the very one the Guardian mysteriously deleted from my drinks column last month, before reinstating it after an outcry), created as a tribute to her son by M&H distillery in Tel Aviv in collaboration with the British branch of Magen David Adom (MDA UK).

The story starts, however, with a beer. Netta was a keen home brewer, so to celebrate his life, “a couple of friends, Olga and Gal Lev, who are brewers, decided to brew a beer in his name”, Ayelet said. The result was a special beer they dubbed “IBA”, Israeli Bitter Ale. It takes the triple hops of an American pale ale and adds the classic Israeli ingredients of dates, honey and citrus. The friends brewed it in a whisky barrel from M&H distillery. Ayelet said: “We loved the beer a lot. It was amazing.”

The empty barrel, now infused with the sweet and hoppy taste of that special beer, went back to M&H. Here, the team, headed up by master distiller Tomer Goren, filled it with a four-and-a-half-year-old whisky that had previously been in a bourbon barrel, and stored it for nearly a year.

Netta’s mother Ayelet Epstein with Daniel Burger from MDA UK

Owing to the hot climate, whisky in Israel matures much faster than in Scotland, so a five-year-old has the richness of a much older spirit.

Ron Gurevitch, who looks after the marketing at M&H, said: “It’s always interesting to age whisky in beer-type casks.

“This one gave it a lot of orange aroma, especially in the finish, with a sweetness from the honey in the beer.”

When the whisky was ready, it was unveiled first at the distillery on October 6 – one day before the anniversary of the pogrom – followed by an event at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where Ayelet spoke. Alongside her was Daniel Burger from MDA UK (which the JC has supported this year, with readers generously funding the purchase of a paramedic motorcycle to mark a year since October 7). MDA runs both Israel’s ambulance and blood services, including a £790,000 underground blood centre in Haifa, which opened with chilling timing on October 9 last year.

The organisation also undertakes humanitarian work in countries such as Haiti, Ukraine and Turkey (after the 2023 earthquake). “It transcends politics,” Burger said. “We don’t get into that, we just get into saving lives.”

He’s a longtime fan of M&H. In fact, he was one of the original crowdfunder investors and his name is on the wall in the distillery.

MDA UK has worked with M&H on fundraising events in London, such as a pop-up Israeli restaurant, and was looking for another collaboration when Gurevitch told him about this special cask of whisky that they were maturing.

“We had the cask and I wanted to find the right collaboration to launch it,” he said. Burger immediately snapped up the opportunity and MDA UK had the whisky bottled.

Then came the event at the kibbutz. “We met Ayelet outside Netta’s destroyed home,” Burger said.

“We all drank a toast to Netta.

“It’s an incredibly powerful story, a memory of Netta and beautiful whisky to boot.”

Each bottle carries a photo of Netta on the front, while the story of his life is told on the back. The whisky will be used to raise money for MDA UK through auctions and prizes.

Like Ayelet, Burger wants to emphasise the optimistic side of Netta’s story, quoting a line from the Talmud: “Whoever saves a life saves the world entire.”

​

To buy a bottle of Netta’s Story whisky, contact the organisation on info@mdauk.org or go to the website: mdauk.org/nettas-story-nettas-whisky-legacy/