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Exhibit on Oct. 7 Nova Music Festival Massacre to Open in Toronto After Successful NYC Run
Nova survivor Natalie Sanandaji looks at items collected from the Nova festival at “The Nova Music Festival Exhibition: October 7th 06:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still” on April 18, 2024 in New York City. Photo: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
An exhibit highlighting the victims, survivors, and atrocities that took place during the Hamas terrorist attack at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, will open in Toronto in April, it was announced on Thursday by the human rights organization The Lawfare Project, which is helping to bring the project to Canada for the first time.
“Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still” (also known as “The Nova Music Festival Exhibition”) will open in Toronto for six weeks from April 23 through June 8. The interactive and educational exhibit will travel to Canada following a 10-week run in Tel Aviv, where it first opened last year, and a highly successful run in New York City, which was extended “due to the overwhelming demand and excitement,” according to organizers.
Toronto is North America’s third-largest city and has the third-largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel. The venue for the exhibit in Toronto will be announced at a later date, but the installation will take over 60,000 square feet of space and become one of the largest exhibitions in Canadian history, according to The Lawfare Project.
“The Lawfare Project Canada is proud to bring the ‘Nova Music Festival Exhibition’ to Toronto,” said Brooke Goldstein, director of The Lawfare Project Canada. “While the ‘Exhibition’ honors the victims and survivors of the terrorist attack at the Nova Music Festival, it also fosters allyship as it educates and highlights the importance of defending human rights and reaffirming our democratic values.”
Hamas-led terrorists infiltrated the music festival in Re’im, Israel, during the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023, and killed 370 people, including four Canadians, and took as hostages 44 innocent music lovers who were attending the festival. During their deadly rampage across southern Israel that day, terrorists killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 captives.
The “Nova Music Festival Exhibition” honors the horrific atrocities that took place on Oct. 7 but also pays tribute to the resilience of the Tribe of Nova community in the aftermath of the attack. The installation takes visitors through a timeline of the deadly massacre, allowing them to relive the harrowing ordeal from Oct. 7 with the help of real artifacts from the site of the attack, such as burnt vehicles, bullet-stained bathroom stalls, and personal belongings abandoned by music festival attendees. The exhibit offers a recreation of the festival grounds with artifacts that visitors can interact with and showcases first-hand footage from the attack, as well as testimonies from festival survivors and bereaved family members, who will be onsite daily at the exhibit to interact with visitors.
“The story of the Nova Music Festival is one of strength, survival, love and community,” said Jesse Brown, who is the lead Canadian representative of the exhibit coming to Toronto. “This exhibit is to honor and remember the victims while also hearing the heart-wrenching stories of survivors who remind the world that we will dance again.”
“This is not a political statement. It is a reflection of what happened at a festival dedicated to love and peace,” added Evan Zelikovitz, who is also a Canadian representative of the exhibit. “It could have happened to you, your son or daughter or friend,” he said. “Come meet the survivors, meet the bereaved families, and hear about the moment music stood still.”
The “Nova Music Festival Exhibition” was created, curated, and directed by Reut Feingold. Since its opening in Tel Aviv, it has also run in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Miami, and has attracted over 300,000 visitors. Celebrities who have attended the exhibit include Diplo, SIA, Usher, Jessica Alba, Will Ferrell, Kristen Bell, David Schwimmer, and Cindy Crawford, according to The Lawfare Project.
“The Nova community is centered around light, and now more than ever we need to continue to spread that message,” said Ofir Amir, founder and producer of The Nova Music Festival. “It is important, as part of our core values, that we take care of our community, help lead in the rehabilitation of the Nova survivors, and make our voices heard to the whole world.”
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
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