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A Tel Aviv exhibit recreates the Nova massacre site in exacting detail, with healing as an aim
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Daniel Ozeri found himself returning to the worst moments of his life on a recent Sunday — not inside his own mind, but inside a Tel Aviv convention center.
Ozeri was in Expo Tel Aviv, a sprawling complex in the city’s north where the Nova music festival — which ended when Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 — has been recreated in exacting detail.
At least 364 party-goers were murdered and 40 taken hostage at the festival on Kibbutz Re’im, which quickly became a powerful symbol of Israel’s loss. Ozeri, like so many others, spent hours running away with “bullets flying over your head,” losing his jewelry as he scrambled in a forested area near the festival site.
He said visiting the exhibit — with its incinerated cars, bullet-ridden portable toilets and piles of personal items — was not easy but felt essential.
“It really brings me back there and the horrific pain of that moment, but we have to return there to memorialize what happened and remember our friends who were killed there,” Ozeri said. Leaving the exhibit for some fresh air, Ozeri recalls in detail how he and his best friend escaped the festival grounds and survived, while some of his close friends and countless others with familiar faces from years of trance parties did not.
It’s a somber experience that the organizers of the “6:29” exhibition — named for the moment the trance music stopped that morning as the sirens of incoming rockets blared — hope is being repeated often during its limited run.
“The whole idea of the memorial here is to actualize what was at the event and where it stopped,” said Sarel Botavia, 26, one of the Nova festival producers who helped design the exhibit. “The exhibit expresses the distance between the love we are trying to express and the hatred and massacre that occurred there.”
An exhibit about the Nova festival massacre on Oct. 7 aims to raise funds for survivors’ therapy and rehabilitation costs. (Eliyahu Freedman)
The exhibit, which charges a minimum donation of NIS 50, or roughly $13.75, to enter, is a fundraiser for the Nova community’s continued healing expenses and long-term vision. It aims to ensure that their legacy is not merely one of tragedy, but of rebirth and survival.
It comes amid both a wave of initiatives to support Nova survivors, including a therapeutic retreat in central Israel, as well as mounting concerns about whether they are getting all the help they desperately need.
Families from the festival community, who lack the geographic bonds of the kibbutzes attacked on Oct. 7, recently formed an association to argue that their needs were being neglected. Initially, the government provided some cash and psychological assistance for survivors and victims of the Nova and Psyduck festivals, but much of the healing expenses since have relied on civilian support. Anger has also poured out within the Nova community over reports indicating that army intelligence in the early morning of Oct. 7 regarding an imminent invasion could have been used to evacuate the festival hours before the onslaught began.
Against that backdrop, the exhibit and other efforts focused on the Nova massacre aim to make true a slogan that has been adopted by what is now being called the “Tribe of Nova”: “We will dance again.”
Visitors to an exhibit about the Nova trance music festival massacre have added messages to a board featuring a slogan used by survivors. (Eliyahu Freedman)
The message has sounded from the earliest days after Oct. 7, as members of the trance music community vowed not to let the attack by Hamas dampen their spirits forever. It has recently gotten powerful boosts from survivors, including one who made a dance video from her wheelchair with social media influencer Montana Tucker. Mia Shem, a 26-year-old who had been abducted from the site and injured, unveiled a tattoo of the slogan after being freed.
Whether walking through a detailed reenactment is helpful to survivors and others is up for debate. For some, being immersed in the sights and sounds of that day could trigger post-traumatic anxiety. But there is also evidence from research that exposure to the scene of trauma can be useful in post-traumatic counseling and recovery.
A psychiatrist who treated Nova survivors in the first few weeks after the tragedy told JTA that each individual response to trauma is different and for some the exhibit can be healing. On the national level, the psychiatrist, who asked to remain anonymous, believes that there is immense power in the Nova community being empowered to take control of their narrative in such a public forum.
Nova festival producer Nimrod Arnin, who lost his sister in the 10/7 attack, said that they are “taking effort to explain to survivors who are coming of the intensity of the experience and that there are some who are choosing not to attend the exhibit.”
And while he explains that the event is “intended for the Israeli public to elevate consciousness and raise funds… except for the exact reenactment of the site, there are no aggressive noises of explosions or gunfire or displays of blood.” Organizers discourage children from attending.
Israelis visit an exhibition of objects collected from the Nova Party Massacre in Tel Aviv, December 28, 2023. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Visitors enter the darkly lit indoor hall and proceed into the “camping area,” with tents and other gear strewn across the floor and a game of backgammon in progress, as many fled the scene without time to assemble their belongings. Past the rows of tents lies the bathroom and parking area where the most gruesome evidence of the Hamas slaughter on site is found: a yellow portable toilet with 11 bullet holes and destroyed cars that were towed from the festival site are stacked on top of each other, burnt beyond recognition.
In the center of the reconstructed dance floor, shrouded by the colorful festival shade, a somber visual projection shows angels rising on loop, representing the young lives tragically taken. On the periphery are sections dedicated to artistic tributes where visitors wrote hundreds of handwritten notes such as “Liron: you are in our hearts forever.”
An area with personal belongings is both an exhibit and an actual lost-and-found.
Personal items abandoned at the Nova trance music festival are collected in a real lost-and-found at an exhibit about the massacre there. (Eliyahu Freedman)
“We brought the gear here for people to see and search for,” explained volunteer Yael Finkelstein, who said there are two kinds of people collecting. ”There are those who were at the party and survived and also families whose children were murdered looking through — there are people who want to throw out the gear and others who really hold onto each item.”
Ozeri combed through the items but said he had little hope of finding his own lost things. Still, he said, he was taking away from the exhibit a small reminder of the “true freedom and happiness” that trance parties bring — one that he vowed would be valuable one day in the future.
“We are not ready to dance again. It is not the appropriate time as we are still mourning all our friends and those who we don’t know where they are,” he said. “There are things much more important than dancing now, but the time will come when all the captives are returned and we will win by dancing. And many people who have no relationship with trance festivals will join to commemorate our friends. If we don’t dance it will be as if we allowed them to defeat us.”
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How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
“One of the things that antisemitism does is, it creates coalitions,” Rabbi David Wolpe recently observed.
How ironic that he made this comment on the show of Theo Von, a right-wing podcaster who interviewed Trump during the 2024 election campaign. Some months later, upon his return from a trip to Qatar, Von suddenly felt the need to talk about the alleged “genocide” in Gaza, only to be quoted favorably in the hard-left music magazine Rolling Stone.
The far-right and the far-left have been coming together over antisemitism at least since 1961, when 10 members of the American Nazi Party attended a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally. Members of the NOI escorted the Nazis to front-row seats for a speech by Malcolm X, who was filling in for the originally scheduled speaker, Elijah Muhammad.
More recently, in 2019, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke called Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “the most important member of the US Congress” for her “Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupied Government].”
That same year, the shooter at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, left behind a manifesto that both embraced white supremacist ideology and incorporated tropes promoted by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and the anti-Israel BDS movement, such as the false claims that Jews had a “large role in every slave trade for the past two thousand years” or that Jews persecute “Christians of modern day Syria and Palestine.” In 2021, left-wing academics adopted the language of David Duke and of the Nazis when they accused Israel of “Jewish supremacy.”
So it shouldn’t really have been a huge surprise to see this marriage of convenience beginning to make its way into today’s free-for-all media landscape. Rolling Stone, whose political slant generally is hard left and whose coverage of Israel, as CAMERA has documented at length, is egregiously biased, gushed over Von:
On Tuesday [May 19], comedian and podcaster Theo Von — who promoted the president during his 2024 campaign and accompanied him on a trip to Qatar last week — said the U.S. was “complicit” in creating the horrors that were taking place in Gaza.
“It feels to me like it’s a genocide that’s happening while we’re alive here … in front of our lives. And I feel like I should say something,” Von said on this week’s episode of the This Past Weekend podcast….
Pope Leo and Von couldn’t be more different, but frustration with the lack of progress toward a sustained cease-fire in Gaza, and the looming threat of more devastation to the region, reflect sentiments both in the U.S. and abroad.
There was a similar love-fest between Dave Smith, the conservative libertarian comedian best known for spouting nonsense on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Krystal Ball, the hard-left host of the online political news show Breaking Point, on Monday. Once again, Dave Smith let loose a dizzying blitz of false information, including making the claim that Iran was in compliance with non-proliferation agreements.
Smith said, “we’re left in the position where you’re supposed to sit here and justify a sneak aggressive, preemptive attack, like somehow you’re supposed to feel like you’re the good guys in an absolute war of choice, against a country that does not have nuclear weapons … Iran is a member of the non-proliferation treaty….”
But despite Iran’s (partial) ratification of the NPT, there have long been concerns about its enrichment capabilities, its building of new nuclear facilities, and its lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, leading up to the June 12 declaration by the IAEA that Iran was out of compliance with its NPT obligations, just a day before Israel’s attack. After that report, Iran threatened to leave the NPT altogether (although it’s clear it was not complying with the treaty).
And yet, instead of pointing any of this out, Ball responded, “and they’re [Israel] a rogue nation attacking like six of their neighbors as we speak and are not part of the non-proliferation [treaty] and we’re supposed to be cool with that” — while Smith nodded in agreement. Later in the show, in what may have been the only accurate claim made on that program, Ball remarked, “that’s the Israel horseshoe, between you and me, Dave.”
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel functioned as a siren call to antisemites everywhere: “It’s open season on the Jews.” Not only has this signal been heeded by certain individuals from both the far-left and the far-right, but a media environment that has no guardrails provides ample opportunities for these two nefarious groups to come together over their ignorance-fueled bigotry.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, and frequently writes about antisemitism in the media.
The post How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Activists Damage Planes at UK Military Base
An activist from Palestine Action sprays a military aircraft engine with red paint at RAF Brize Norton, to damage it, in Carterton, Britain, June 20, 2025, in this still image obtained from handout video. The group’s action was in protest of British military assistance to Israel, claiming that they, “interrupted Britain’s direct participation in the commission of genocide and war crimes across the Middle East”, stating on their website. Photo: Palestine Action/Handout via REUTERS
Anti-Israel activists broke into a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, damaging and spraying red paint over two planes used for refueling and transport.
Palestine Action said two members had entered the Brize Norton base in Oxfordshire, putting paint into the engines of the Voyager aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“Despite publicly condemning the Israeli government, Britain continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel US/Israeli fighter jets,” the group said in a statement, posting a video of the incident on X.
“Britain isn’t just complicit, it’s an active participant in the Gaza genocide and war crimes across the Middle East.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the “vandalism” as “disgraceful” in a post on X.
Britain’s defense ministry and police were investigating.
“It is our responsibility to support those who defend us,” the defense ministry said.
A spokesperson for Starmer said the government was reviewing security across all British defense sites.
Palestine Action is among groups that have regularly targeted defense firms and other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
The group said it had also sprayed paint on the runway and left a Palestine flag there.
The Gaza war was triggered when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel in October 2023, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages.
US ally Israel subsequently launched a military campaign in Gaza aimed at dismantling Hamas and freeing the hostages.
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US Supreme Court Upholds Law on Suing Palestinian Authorities Over Terror Attacks
The US Supreme Court building is seen the morning before justices are expected to issue opinions in pending cases, in Washington, DC, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
The US Supreme Court upheld on Friday a statute passed by Congress to facilitate lawsuits against Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured in terrorist attacks abroad as plaintiffs pursue monetary damages for violence years ago in Israel and the West Bank.
The 9-0 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that the 2019 law, the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, violated the rights of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization to due process under the US Constitution.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said the 2019 jurisdictional law comported with due process rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
“It is permissible for the federal government to craft a narrow jurisdictional provision that ensures, as part of a broader foreign policy agenda, that Americans injured or killed by acts of terror have an adequate forum in which to vindicate their right” to compensation under a federal law known as the Antiterrorism Act of 1990, Roberts wrote.
The US government and a group of American victims and their families had appealed the lower court’s decision that struck down a provision of the law.
Among the plaintiffs are families who in 2015 won a $655 million judgment in a civil case alleging that the Palestinian organizations were responsible for a series of shootings and bombings around Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. They also include relatives of Israeli-American Ari Fuld, who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian in 2018.
“The plaintiffs, US families who had loved ones maimed or murdered in PLO-sponsored terror attacks, have been waiting for justice for many years,” said Kent Yalowitz, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
“I am very hopeful that the case will soon be resolved without subjecting these families to further protracted and unnecessary litigation,” Yalowitz added.
The ongoing violence involving Israel and the Palestinians served as a backdrop to the case.
US courts for years have grappled over whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian Authority and PLO for actions taken abroad.
Under the language at issue in the 2019 law, the PLO and Palestinian Authority automatically “consent” to jurisdiction if they conduct certain activities in the United States or make payments to people who attack Americans.
Roberts in Friday’s ruling wrote that Congress and the president enacted the jurisdictional law based on their “considered judgment to subject the PLO and PA [Palestinian Authority] to liability in US courts as part of a comprehensive legal response to ‘halt, deter, and disrupt’ acts of international terrorism that threaten the life and limb of American citizens.”
New York-based US District Judge Jesse Furman ruled in 2022 that the law violated the due process rights of the PLO and Palestinian Authority. The New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.
President Joe Biden’s administration initiated the government’s appeal, which subsequently was taken up by President Donald Trump’s administration. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on April 1.
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