As Israel considers how to honor October 7 victims, festival exhibition serves as ‘sacred space’

A backgammon set is suspended mid-game. There are tents and folding picnic chairs between the trees. A psychedelic dance floor with downtempo and chillout trance in the background, while video screens show images of blushing, ecstatic young people moving to a silent beat.

The objects, recovered from the October 7 trance festival “Tribe of Nova” in Re’im in southern Israel, are part of a new installation in a huge hangar at the Tel Aviv fairgrounds, capturing some of the essence of an event dedicated to peace and love, but was shut down by barrage of rocket fire from Gaza.

In the horror that followed, hundreds of Hamas gunmen stormed across the border and surrounded the music festival, ambushing people in their cars along the road and chasing them as they fled through the fields. According to Israeli authorities, at least 360 festival-goers were killed that day – almost a third of the total killed in the Hamas-led attack. Others have been taken to Gaza and are still being held hostage there.

The exhibition, which opened to the public for two weeks on December 7, is called “Nova 6.29” – tentatively that morning around sunrise, when the music stopped.

“It shows the idea behind Nova’s community and tells the story of 6:29, when light turned to darkness,” said Yoni Feingold, an Israeli entertainment mogul and initiator of the project. “It is a huge monument to the almost 400 deaths.”

The installation is one of the first physical commemorations of the events of October 7. Israelis are only beginning to consider how to commemorate the victims of that Saturday, the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year history.

Some people talk about preserving, as a kind of museum, the charred ruins of neighborhoods in border communities that were attacked. Various organizations collect testimonies from survivors.

The country has not yet observed an official day of national mourning, having gone straight to war against Hamas in Gaza.

Yellow portable toilet stalls are lined up in a corner of the hall, the lower halves of some doors riddled with bullet holes. Nearby a tangle of burnt cars.

At the opening of the exhibition, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog described the exhibition as “a sacred space.”

“The fragments of the party and the torn pieces of life now lie here as a silent testimony, in memory of all the enormous human beauty that has been lost,” he said, adding: “The carnage and the deep and painful wound it caused. , are the legacy of an entire generation.”

Proceeds from the exhibition, which is expected to remain in Tel Aviv for a few weeks, will go to survivors and families of the dead.

“We are looking ahead,” said Raz Malka, 27, a member of the Nova production team who survived the attack. “The terrorists came to humiliate and kill people who were having the time of their lives there,” he said, adding: “We will dance again” – the Nova team’s new motto.

The festival’s main stage is now set up in the exhibition hall and etched with the names of the production workers who built it, stayed to dismantle it when the rocket fire started, and died. A second stage nearby – from the Mushroom Project, which featured Goa trance, a style that originated in India – was produced by twin brothers Osher and Michael Vaknin, 35, from Jerusalem. They too were killed.

Tables labeled “Lost and Found” are laden with belongings retrieved from the site: rows of shoes; glasses and sunglasses; bags and pouches; toiletries; car and house keys.

Video of people dancing in their final moments is juxtaposed with screenshots of WhatsApp conversations from that day, capturing the fear and terror as people tried to run and hide. Another scrolling screen shows portraits of those who never made it home.

Idit Shachal, who recently visited the exhibition on a weekday, said she “came to see and understand.” Her son, Nadav, 24, had survived the rave after fleeing on foot with a friend for eight hours until they found shelter in a village almost 10 miles away.

“My heart hurts,” Ms. Shachal said, looking at the burned-out cars. “The thought that all these things come from there.”