NYC exhibit reveals painful details of the Nova Music Festival massacre
With piles of battered shoes, recovered cell phones replaying frantic messages to loved ones, and video installations capturing the confusion and terror of the day, the new downtown exhibit on the Oct. 7 Nova music festival massacre evokes equal parts 9/11 Memorial and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.
“The Nova Music Festival Exhibition: October 7th 06:29am – The Moment Music Stood Still,” kicks off a month-long run Sunday at an event space at 35 Wall St., with an installation that pays painstaking tribute to the 370 attendees killed by Hamas.
Thousands of pieces of evidence — burnt out cars, bullet-pierced port-o-potties, half-drunk bottles of water, prayer books, yarmulkes, and even blood-soaked men’s shorts with a bullet hole through the crotch — were shipped from Israel and used to meticulously recreate scenes that reveal how peaceful moments were shattered when thousands of rockets rained down.
“We wanted to do something for people’s memories — where people can come and pay their respects, and we started the exhibition,” said Ofir Amir, the 41-year-old Nova co-founder who still walks with a cane after being shot in the legs on Oct. 7.
“This wasn’t a terror attack. This was something much bigger – it’s biblical,” he added. “We’re fighting for our survival every day.”
Exhibit creator, director and writer Reut Feingold said she wanted to give people the experience of the festival before Hamas invaded.
“It’s not an exhibition about Nova. It is Nova — we want them to feel — to feel the journey, the light in their hearts before” the attack, she said.
“On that day, random decisions meant the difference between life and death,” read one sign on display.
The exhibit doesn’t shy away from the extremity of the violence that was unleashed on the music festival.
“In some cases, they set them on fire and burned them in such a way that when we examined them, we suddenly realized what had appeared to us as one person was actually three,” one rescue volunteer recalled in one of the exhibition’s many videos.
People with shell shocked expressions walk haltingly through the darkened, 50,000-square-foot space, which ends with a light-filled healing tent and lighthouse declaring the now-famous proclamation, “We will dance again.”
Tickets start at $1, with options to add donations to survivors.
