The Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 am – The Moment Music Stood Still: The Nova Music Festival Exhibition has come to Culver City, California, and will run until October 8, a day after the one-year anniversary of the deadly Hamas attack on the festival.
On October 7, 2023, 370 attendees were murdered by Hamas, and 44 taken hostage into Gaza. The exhibit includes the Nova stage and bar setup, tents, clothing, burned cars, and phone recordings left behind by survivors and victims. Survivors and families of victims and hostages have been present at the exhibit and engage with the visitors.
According to the website, "The Nova Exhibition is an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at The Nova Music Festival on October 7. The installation sets out to recreate a festival dedicated to peace and love that was savagely cut short by a terrorist attack on that fateful day. The attack at The Nova Music Festival was the largest massacre in music history."
Ashley Kermani Anderson, a Los Angeles resident with Persian heritage, shared her impressions of the exhibit: "It felt like you were actually at the festival. They play a video of what the Nova festival is about – peace and love – and then there are all these screams from the attack. I thought I knew the extent, but going made me realize how much worse it really was."
She recalled first becoming aware of the attack on social media following Sukkot: "We were all on our phones and saw the videos, but it was censored, and here it was not, and you felt the chaos of the situation." The uncensored footage at the exhibit was so intense that it caused her to vomit. During the October 7 attack, Anderson's parents were visiting relatives in Israel and frantically sought a way to leave the country immediately. She remembered her mother saying, "She felt like she was back in Iran and fleeing."
Anderson encouraged non-Jews to visit the exhibit, explaining: "It's facts; it's real. It can't be biased or political. It made me sad that there were only Jewish people there. We already know." She described how the events of October 7 changed her own life in the United States: "I don't wear any Jewish anything because I don't want to attract any attention." She even mentioned reconsidering her vote in November, leaning towards a candidate who demonstrated stronger support for Israel.
The exhibit has already occurred in New York and has hosted hundreds of thousands of visitors. Moran Stella Yanai, a former Israeli hostage kidnapped from the Nova Festival and later released in a prisoner exchange deal, visited the New York exhibit and found her own shoes among the "lost and found" exhibit made from collected belongings at the Nova site.
Yagil Simony, Ofir Amir, and Omri Sari originally organized and displayed the exhibit in Israel. American music producer Scooter Braun went to Israel, saw the exhibit, and decided to collaborate with them to bring the display to the United States. "I see the tents, and I see the porta potties, and I see everything, and I immediately go, 'I need to bring this to New York and LA. People need to see this,'" he told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's a massacre at a music festival that should have never happened," he said. "Music is a universal language, and music has to remain a safe place."
"You see the testimonies from survivors. You see videos from their phones. You see the video that Hamas took and put all online to understand what happened that day," Braun described the exhibit. "You'll see it is a music festival. You'll see Coachella. You'll see Stagecoach ... And that's all we want people to see, that you should be able to have empathy for all people."
