On Tuesday, I visited the Nova Music Festival Exhibition — a travelling installation dedicated to the memory of the brutal massacre of 360 Nova music festival attendees and hostage taking of 44 others by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023 — an event the organizers point out is the largest massacre in music history. The exhibit speaks to the remarkable resilience of surviving festival-goers and their desire to heal their community which they refer to as the Nova Tribe. What’s unfortunate, is that doing so requires such a heavy and costly security detail.

Shortly after October 7, exhibit organizers, still reeling from having experienced that horrific day in Re’im, Israel, themselves, set out to create an exhibit that would honour the victims, support survivors and educate visitors. A little over two months after the horrific attack on the festival, the opened at Expo Tel Aviv in Israel on Dec. 13, 2023. From there, it went on to New York, Los Angeles and Miami, before coming to Toronto where it will conclude on June 8. I am told it will be travelling to Europe next.

Waiting to enter the exhibit, I and others outside in line, were struck by the fact that there was a sniffer dog being led around the outside fence by security in order to ensure the area was safe for visitors and staff. After having my ticket scanned, I entered the door to what could have been a scene in an airport — a security detail had each visitor place their belongings in a tray to be inspected and scanned while the visitors passed through full-body scanners.

After I’d finished the tour, Evan Zelikovitz, the Canadian representative for the exhibition told me that the highest cost for the festival, by far, was security.

Any reasonable person would find it disgraceful that an event like this would need to be protected, but this is a sad reality in Canada. While our country has the world’s

fourth largest Jewish population

(according to the 2021 Census around 393,500 people, or 1.06 per cent of Canada’s population) the community has been consistently subjected to the highest number of hate crimes. This only worsened after October 7, 2023. By the end of that year, police-reported hate crimes against the Jewish community

increased

by 71 per cent to 900 of the 1,284.

The exhibit begins with a room where visitors can sit and watch the moments before the tragedy occurs, or, as the exhibit puts it, “the moment the music stands still,” which has been determined to have been 6:29 a.m. IDT. Festival-goers are enjoying themselves, peacefully smiling and dancing.

The DJ is told to stop the music and to inform the crowd of a red alert. It’s at this point that rockets can be seen in the sky, not an uncommon occurrence in Israel, but the organizers immediately took it seriously. The festival-goers started to leave the area and head toward their cars, slowly at first, but then more quickly, not knowing what we know now, that route 232 was strategically blocked by Hamas terrorists.

The exhibit continues in the next room which is dark and smokey, with a thin-layer of sand on its floor. Several screens show videos without placards which illustrate Hamas’ rampage, including the attackers shooting at vehicles of those trying to escape as well as a recording of a terrorist calling his family to tell them he murdered Jews: “Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew. I just killed her and her husband with my own hands. I killed 10! Dad, I killed 10 with my hands. Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed.”

The darkness continues as visitors walk through a room with tents and camping chairs with phones of festival-goers plugged in and charging while being introduced to more video stories from survivors.

How the exhibit chooses to tell these stories may seem counter-intuitive for their lack of anger. Survivors give full accounts of running and hiding under vehicles or bushes, often injured, or hiding in bomb shelters, while those around them were less fortunate as successive grenades were lobbed into the structures. One man describes keeping a woman, a mother of three, who begged him to save her, alive. They both hid under a vehicle and were later rescued. A medic recounts how the bodies kept coming in, and how painful it was not to be able to save them all. One patient, he told us, had been shot so many times by an AK-47 that he wasn’t sure that she’d survive, even with his help. The video ends with their heartfelt reunion. All of the videos in the exhibit emphasized the importance of community and how they helped each other through the nightmare.

Towards the end of the exhibit is a warehouse of found items from the festival site which you can pick up and hold, including hats, shoes, purses and wallets. In a video in this section of the exhibit, a woman responsible for collecting and identifying the owners of these items discussed the difficulty of collecting jewelry from the grounds, and, in one example, of having to send earrings back to the families of two women who had been burnt and were otherwise unrecognizable.

In one corner, a countdown clock reminds visitors that there are still hostages who need to be brought home. In another, visitors can leave cards of remembrance on a long table where the hostages’ pictures line the wall.

The exhibit ends with a message of hope and a declaration that they will all dance again.

In their efforts to support festival survivors — who the exhibit explains are experiencing psychological trauma including flashbacks, anxiety, sleep disorders, and difficulty functioning day-to-day on top of the difficulty of grieving for friends and family who were killed or kidnapped at the event — the Tribe of Nova Foundation has held healing sessions which have been well-attended by survivors and members of bereaved families, 140 memorials and 120 community day gatherings focused on healing and enhancing mental health. In addition, the foundation has provided US$ 900,000 in emergency grants to assist bereaved families and survivors with living stipends. They have also helped festival survivors, who were largely in their mid 20’s to 30’s, navigate the arduous process of securing government benefits.

Notably, there is not one Israeli flag or call for vengeance in the entire exhibit. Instead, the words: friendship, faith, compassion, strength, courage, support, recovery, love, freedom, and community, line the floor that leads the exhibit’s visitors back into the light.

tnewman@postmedia.com

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• Nova Music Festival Exhibition to open in Toronto with personal items from victims of Hamas attack
• Nova festival exhibit honouring victims, survivors of Hamas attacks to make Canadian debut in Toronto