In the weeks after Palestinian terrorists killed nearly 400 people at an Israeli music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, a growing corps of citizen-volunteers trekked to the site of the massacre to collect the personal items left behind. The group warehoused the items and organized and tagged them so survivors and the relatives of victims could retrieve them. The police saw the effort as helpful to their investigation: Once they’d studied and recorded the scene, the items could bring forward witnesses or others with information.
When I saw some of these items on display in Washington DC on Thursday, at a pre-opening walkthrough of the Nova Exhibition at Gallery Place, where it will be open to the public from June 14 through July 6, they conjured a different image entirely. I found myself staring at a pile of shoes collected from the site of the massacre and thought of the only place I’d seen its kind before: at a Holocaust memorial.
It also helped me understand why the survivors of the Nova massacre who serve as guides to the exhibition kept asking me how I felt about what I was seeing and experiencing. That these various scenes would hit people differently was taken for granted.
However it hits you, it does so immediately. The first staging area is a recreated Nova campground. The twist is that almost everything you see was actually at the 2023 Nova festival. These tents aren’t replicas. Only the people who lived in them for the weekend are missing.
In and around the tents are people’s clothing, shoes, board games, even a burned up cigarette butt and the occasional can of deodorant. Cellphones are plugged into wall chargers and strewn throughout the campground; they are playing loops of videos from Oct. 7—some survivors’ videos, some taken by Hamas terrorists themselves. The campsites attest to the joyful atmosphere of the festival—one has a tree sign hanging next to it that says “HAPPY PLACE”; another has a simple pair of wings hanging from a pole.
The dark irony of the scene is that the Nova festival itself isn’t seen merely as a music event but also as a healing one. The setting—breathtaking open fields in the desert—combined with the trance music that dominates the festival draws many who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. As survivor Maya Izoutcheev pointed out, concertgoers dance through the night and don’t see their fellow dancers around them until the sun rises, giving them a sense of privacy and of a close-knit shared experience at the same time.
Later in the exhibition, one enters a room in which there’s part of the Nova stage and main signs, along with other parts of the concert area and even the bar. There’s one room entirely dedicated to the hostages; another to the murdered festival-goers. Each floor gets a bit brighter until one reaches the final, healing room. Open, sparse furniture, festival clips and individual pairs of headphones are available for visitors to listen along, plus information about the survivor groups.
This last proves to be a crucial pathway to recovery. Another Nova survivor and exhibition guide, Millet Ben Haim, and I talked about the difficulty that some survivors have finding their place in Israel’s national conversation about Oct. 7. What survivors went through was harrowing—bodies everywhere, Hamas gunmen smoking them out of the bushes where they were hiding by lighting the fields on fire, claustrophobic roadside shelters in which many were killed when terrorists tossed grenades into them, tearful and terrified phone calls to parents and loved ones—but they survived nonetheless. Plus, freed or rescued hostages are Israel’s better known survivors from this conflict. “What I went through was not OK just because what others went through was worse,” she tells me, which is a difficult point to make in a country where the trauma was so widespread yet the experiences so varied. Nova survivors find refuge in fellow survivors.
I asked Millet if she’d go to future music festivals, and she said she hopes to but “it’s a tricky thing.” Such festivals are “usually the safest place for us,” and that has been shattered.
Maya, for her part, only avoids one room: the one with the main stage setup. At the same time, she beamed throughout a brief film showing scenes from the festival that plays at the end of one of the exhibit floors; she smiled and pointed out everyone she knew.
Both Maya and Millet had initially tried to escape in cars. Both, in fact, were in the driver’s seat. I asked Millet what that part was like—normal prosaic tasks that suddenly must be done in the midst of terror. “You have only one chance to do it,” she said, noting that a U-turn in the face of terrorists approaching your vehicle has the world riding on it. “If I freeze, they’ll not just murder me but all of my friends, too.”
Though the experience of those at the festival was unique, it shares an unsurprising thread of continuity and cohesion with the broader Israeli and Jewish world since Oct. 7: the hostages. The efforts to bring home those who are still in the hands of Hamas represent a proactive cause for Israelis across the board. While each survivor heals in his or her own particular way, the broader healing, Maya said, “can only start when everyone is home.”
