I wanted to bear witness to what happened the morning of Oct. 7.
Today marks the eight-month anniversary of Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel. I recently visited the Nova Music Festival exhibition that’s been erected in downtown NYC. Anyone who visits this installation will never forget it.
Backpacks, water bottles, sand that’s been collected from Kibbutz Re’im, folding chairs, Birkenstocks, coolers, books, diaries, tents, backgammon sets — all things you might find at a music festival, but in this case, these are what remains of an estimated 360 people — most in their 20s — who attended the Nova Festival in Israel. On October 7, just as the sun was rising — an almost sacred time for all those who had gathered — their world was destroyed, their lives ended. Forty-four people were taken hostage.
The Nova exhibit, currently housed in what was once the original JP Morgan at 35 Wall Street, is an eerie recreation — with even dirt from the festival — of the things left behind. It forces us to put ourselves in the shoes of festivalgoers and the unimaginable terror when, out of the blue, Hamas fighters descended on the site and murdered the innocent young people, many of them running, hiding, or begging for their lives. I wanted to bear witness to what happened that morning. The stream of initial accounts simply doesn’t begin to convey the horror of that day.
I watched videos of a young man crouched down, hiding beneath a tree, telling his family he loved them. A girl running — sprinting, really — a look of utter fear on her face, the kind you normally see in a scripted disaster movie. I heard testimonials from a good samaritan who was able to fill his car with those fleeing but still feels shame for those he couldn’t get to. (His name is Rami Davidian. He saved 750 people that day, making countless trips and coordinating others to various pick-up locations.) A female police officer had the unimaginable job of walking through the wreckage, collecting the items that had been separated from their owners. It’s impossible to listen to these stories or witness the collateral heartache and not feel their pain or wonder, what if I had been among them?
There’s a massive table full of shoes worn by the festivalgoers with a sign that says “Lost and Found.” It reminds me of the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. There’s a table of jewelry and other mementos. I kept wondering about the people who wore those shoes, necklaces, and bandanas. I wondered whose birth control pills those were.
Porta-potties, riddled with bullets, are on display. The row of them at the festival would turn out to be a deadly hiding place. There’s a burned-out car, one of many that lined the road leading out of the festival grounds.
The most moving part of the exhibit for me was the rows of photographs of those who had been killed. Their faces looked at me, their whole lives once stretching before them. Their futures now extinguished.
At the end of the exhibit, in pink light, are the words, “We will dance again,” a symbol of the resilience of the Israeli people. A symbol that there will once again be light.
As the horror of the war continues, what started it all is too often forgotten. I went to remember them, honor them, and pray for them. And pray for the world.
The exhibit will be in NYC through June 16th. Go to novaexhibition.com for more information.
