As you step out of the Gallery Place Metro station in Washington, DC, your eyes may be drawn to a blend of historic and contemporary architecture that you would expect to see in the nation’s capital. But just a few blocks away, something rather unexpected and shocking has appeared: a portal to Israel.
No, you don’t physically get transported to Israel, but in many ways, you feel like you have been. Your senses are taken on an adventure. You can feel the sand beneath your feet, see the dim light of early morning and the setup of campgrounds at a music festival. And then you hear the gunshots and screaming that erupted when Hamas terrorists targeted the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, Israel, on October 7, 2023.
The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, subtitled “06:29 AM–The Moment Music Stood Still” and running through July 6 at The Gallery at Gallery Place in DC, not only recreates the scene with video footage from the day along with actual belongings of the victims, it also features accounts from survivors, cars that were burnt almost beyond recognition and the portable toilets where festivalgoers tried to hide, riddled with bullet holes.
Bringing the scene of such horror to life is quite traumatic, not only difficult for exhibit viewers but also for the Nova survivors who tour with the display to share their stories. Once you make your way through the first part, there is a short video that tells you about the Nova Music Festival. And as you go upstairs to the second floor, there is still much to see. There are uniforms and written stories about police and security guards who died trying to protect festivalgoers. There are also tables with the belongings of victims of the massacre arranged by the type of article of clothing or accessory.
Liat, an Israeli volunteer who didn’t want to share her full name, tours with the items in the Nova exhibit. After October 7, she started volunteering at Expo, a convention center in Tel Aviv, where items found at the Nova site were brought to be sorted, along with donated items for displaced families. Over 4,000 items were returned to those they belonged to, according to Liat. All of the items that had been collected are in police possession, and if you look under the items on the tables at the exhibit, you can find a barcode that leads to the police’s website where the items can be reclaimed. Nova survivors and released hostages have found some of their belongings while visiting the Nova exhibit. “From time to time, there are closures of the stories,” Liat says.
In the next room, 411 photos are arranged along the four walls to memorialize those who lost their lives at the Nova festival during the massacre or in captivity. But each one of those headshots is more than a photo on a wall or a couple of lines describing someone. Each person has a story, one that ended too early.
The exhibition originated as a memorial in Tel Aviv, according to Ofir Amir, cofounder of the Nova Festival and the exhibit that followed. The decision to tour the United States and Canada came after seeing so much antisemitism and denial of October 7 on social media. “This exhibit has nothing to do with politics or religion. It’s what happened at a music festival,” Amir says. “And when you walk through, it’s not about taking sides. It’s between good and evil. Between the darkness and the light.”
Amir was there on October 7, himself a survivor of the horrific massacre. After rockets started flying overhead at 6:29 in the morning, Amir stayed behind to help the police evacuate everyone. After about two hours, they realized they were surrounded by terrorists. As Amir and his friends hopped in a car and drove away, about five or six terrorists saw them and opened fire. The bullets went through the car, hitting Amir in both of his legs. The driver managed to get away and hid among trees. Amir was in debilitating pain and got out of the car. Realizing he couldn’t walk, he laid next to the car for hours. He noticed that his friend who was in front of him also got shot. His friend died laying next to him after two hours. Amir knew he had to stop the bleeding. The only thing keeping him going was the thought of his wife Lior, who was home and nine months pregnant with their first child. After about four hours, Amir was rescued and taken to the hospital.
At the exhibit, I was greeted by Maya Izoutcheev, another survivor of the Nova massacre, in the healing room, which is set up for survivors and for visitors to recover after bearing witness to some of the atrocities that took place on October 7. Tearfully, Izoutcheev told me her story. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors, her parents are from Russia, the former Soviet Union, and she currently lives in Jaffa. Izoutcheev was working at the festival along with nine of her friends. She worked all night as a bouncer and returned to her campsite after six in the morning, standing in a parking lot with her friends to watch the sunrise. At 6:29 am, the speakers shut off and the music stopped. As they looked up into the sky, they saw an unusual number of rockets. “We are used to one, two or three rockets, but not this amount,” she says. “We don’t know what’s going on and the alarm is going crazy. We’re in the middle of nowhere, so we don’t have a place to hide or a bomb shelter.”
The group of friends started running to their cars. It was chaos as 4,000 people were trying to leave and there was only one dirt road that led to the main road. Izoutcheev and her friend Sagi were trying to drive away. She thought there was a traffic jam because of people trying to escape the rockets, but she didn’t realize that there were terrorists down the road on both sides targeting cars and shooting at them. At around 7:35 a.m., she and her friend found a small bomb shelter that already had about 30 people in it. In shock, Izoutcheev didn’t understand what was going on. “I thought that everybody is going nuts, and I’m the only normal person in the world. I was like, ‘What is going on here? Everything is okay,’” she says. “Maybe there are, I don’t know, two or three crazy people shooting on the road, soon, we have forces, we will have police.” After 10 minutes of hearing gun fire get closer and closer and realizing police were not coming, Sagi grabbed Izoutcheev’s hand and said they had to leave. “I don’t know why I listened to him, because for me, it was not the smartest thing to leave a bomb shelter when they are bombing,” she says. A few minutes after they left the shelter was attacked. Terrorists threw seven grenades inside and shot people several times. There were only six survivors and hostages were taken.
Soon after they got back in the car and started driving, they hit a traffic jam. A car in front of them almost crashed into a tree. “The driver got out of the car and started screaming, ‘Please help me. They shot her.’ The passenger-side door opened, and a woman fell to the ground, she was screaming as blood spewed from her neck,” Izoutcheev recalls. (Nine months after the attack, she learned from a Facebook post that the woman did not survive.) At that moment, Izoutcheev had a flight reaction and ran into a field. Still in shock, she froze and covered her eyes with her hands. Her friend’s son, who was a photographer at the festival, ran toward her and asked what she was doing. He didn’t know there were terrorists on the road and he wanted to go back to get his photography equipment. She screamed and begged him not to go and he realized she wasn’t joking. They ran for four and a half hours and made it to Patish, a moshav (a kibbutz-type enclave). By 5 p.m., she made it home. Some of her friends were not that lucky.
The Nova exhibition opened in DC a few weeks after two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed in front of the Capital Jewish Museum, just a half-mile away from where the exhibit is located. “I’m not afraid. Maybe I should be, I don’t know. We have a lot of security here,” Izoutcheev says, referring to uniformed guards at the exhibit site. “I want to say I always feel safe, but it comes with [feeling that] I’m always unsafe. There could be a shooting here, a shooting there…that’s part of the trauma.”
When Amir woke up in Israel to the news that a terror attack had occurred in DC, he’d canceled meetings that day. “We’re going to open an exhibit in a place where there has been a terror attack, so for us, we immediately thought ‘We have our delegation of survivors, bereaved families, returned hostages and our staff, and we have to do everything to keep them safe, but not only them, everyone who will come to the exhibit,’” Amir recalls. So they increased security and are getting help from the Metropolitan DC Police Department.
Jews and non-Jews alike will no doubt be moved by the experience of the Nova exhibition. To this day, it has stuck with me. I also think about something Izoutcheev said—that she went to the actual Nova site after the massacre, and had a similar feeling to when she toured Auschwitz. It’s a sense that something bad happened there, but you don’t see what. At the Nova exhibition you see footage from that day, testimonials and remnants from the massacre. You can speak to real people who survived.
“Even though the worst and unimaginable thing happened to us, this will not define us. This is not who we are. We are strong, and we are strongest when we are together,” Amir says. “This shouldn’t happen anywhere in the world. This should never happen. We will dance again.”
Top image: Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Washington, DC (Photos by Megan Naftali).