Nova massacre memorial comes to Southern California

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CULVER CITY, Calif. — A single rubber flip flop lies on a blanket dusted with sand in a giant warehouse in Culver City, Calif. Nestled nearby, a cell phone displays a series of text messages between a dance party attendee and a loved one miles away.

Dozens of video monitors, interspersed among empty tents and lawn chairs, play graphic scenes of Hamas militants attacking the Nova Music Festival in Israel near the Gaza border, during the early morning hours of October seventh.

Among those attending the festival that day, hundreds were killed and scores of hostages were taken.

In response, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza that has since killed more than 40,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Survivors and organizers of the Nova Festival created this exhibit and memorial — “October 7, 6:29am — The Moment the Music Stood Still” — to bear witness to the massacre and to ask others to do the same. The installation is in part a recreation of the festival grounds that originally opened in Tel Aviv late last year. It’s now on display in Southern California through early October.

Ilon Faktor, who helped create the exhibit, points to one of the large monitors showing men dressed in black riding motorbikes into crowds of dancers. “Some of the footage there is taken by Hamas themselves while attacking,” he says. “And some of it is by the kids hiding, calling home and trying to escape.”

Visitors to the memorial walk among portraits of the dead and artifacts from the event — including burned out cars and porta potties riddled with bullet holes — while listening to trance music that played through the night at the Nova Festival. One section of the exhibit is devoted to survivors of sexual assault that day.

“Everything is authentic — everything that you see,” says Faktor, who points to a large video monitor. “In this movie, you can see the Hamas terrorists walking from porta potty to porta potty shooting them all.”

On hand to meet and talk with people walking through the exhibit is survivor and memorial creator Yotam Ben Kalifa. He says 48 of his friends were killed that day.

“Before October 7,” says the 25-year-old, “if I lose one friend in a car accident, my whole world was upside down. And today, after October seven, when you lose this amount of people, I don't know how to really face this thing.”

But he’s trying to respond with hope and resilience.

“One of the things is to make big memorials,” he says, “and to remember these people that only came for a festival.”

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The memorial resists both intentional and unintentional forgetting

Dozens of synagogues are taking group tours of the memorial through early October. Among them is Steven Wise Temple in Los Angeles, where 17-year-old Eliana Svilik is a member. She found the cell phone video of victims the most moving.

“The recordings of the kids calling their parents,” she says, “that's what I would have done.”

For her, the memorial is a way of acknowledging the victims’ humanity.

“You know, regardless of your politics, you need to have empathy for other human beings,” she says. “And the people at the Nova Festival, they were just human beings trying to have a good time.”

Eliana’s mother Mariya Svilik wept throughout the tour — not just for what happened that day but for the reaction since.

“Outside of Jews, the world doesn't care,” she says. “The second you bring up the festival, people talk about ‘What about these other people?’ No one wants to talk about the festival.”

Svilik is determined to strengthen her resolve and keep alive the memories of Jews and others Hamas killed on October seventh.

But remembering is an uphill battle, says Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback of Steven Wise Temple, who toured the exhibit with more than a dozen members of his congregation on a recent Friday afternoon.

“The forgetting began almost immediately after October seventh,” he says.

Zweiback, who’s bringing multiple groups to the memorial in the coming weeks, is disappointed that the world’s attention now is so focused on the deaths in Gaza.

“Almost immediately after October seventh, the finger was pointed at Israel as if somehow it was responsible for an act of horrific terror,” he says. “And I just think we have to reject that wholeheartedly.”

Zweiback and others from the synagogue argue that Hamas broke a years-long pause in open warfare when it attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking hundreds of others hostage.

Ordinary objects hold extraordinary meaning

A section of the memorial called “Lost and Found” is similar to Holocaust memorials: shoes and backpacks fill tables alongside piles of keys and eyeglasses. These are items gathered from the festival grounds in the days and weeks following the attack.

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Over the months this exhibit was open in Tel Aviv and later in New York, some survivors touring the memorial actually found items they’d abandoned in haste and took them home. But thousands of other objects remain unclaimed, possibly because their owners are now dead or captive in Gaza.

Jeffrey and Hannah Wachs came to the memorial with 75 members of their synagogue, Valley Beth Shalom in Encino. They were particularly moved by the ordinariness of the items on display.

“One of them was a pair of goggles,” says Jeffrey, who attended dance parties similar to Nova in his youth. “I remember picking it up and [thinking] like, ‘I had goggles just like this from many years ago.’”

For the couple, these personal items hold a special relevance.

“Actually seeing physical evidence of real specific people who dropped their contact lens case, who brought a silly pillow with them,” says Hannah, “and you think someone picked out that pillow and decided to bring it to a music festival. This is a very specific real person.”

These ordinary objects are an extraordinary means of honoring and remembering the dead, says Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz of Valley Beth Shalom.

The goal is, “to help bear witness and learn the lesson that we've learned as Jews and as human beings,” he says, “so that our kids can grow up in a world where they can trust in humanity.”