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Why an exhibit that honors the Oct. 7 hostages still draws crowds in the U.S., even after their release
When I traveled to Chicago recently to tour the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, I expected to find it nearly empty. More than two years have passed since Oct. 7, 2023. All the living hostages have been returned home, and only one hostage’s remains are still being held in Gaza. I figured people were done revisiting the horrors, and ready to move on.
I was wrong. In Chicago, 1,200 visitors had purchased tickets for that day alone. This traveling exhibition, which uses actual objects from the Nova festival grounds to reconstruct the scene of the attacks, has been drawing massive crowds since it opened in Tel Aviv in December 2023.
By the time it reached Chicago after stops in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., Berlin and Toronto, more than 500,000 people had already passed through its doors. And the crowds continue to visit. The exhibition’s website announces, “new cities coming soon,” even as the events of October 7 recede into the background.
When my Uber pulled up to the exhibition — held in a warehouse — I saw lines of people, police cars, and security personnel. What were all these people doing here, I wondered?
The question wasn’t idle. I had my own doubts about what had drawn me. Was it morbid curiosity? Perhaps a voyeuristic urge? Beyond these unsettling questions, accusations from protesters who had demonstrated outside the June 2024 New York installation had gotten into my head. They had tried to shut down the exhibition there, calling it “apartheid apologia,” designed to justify Israel’s war on Gaza. Were they right?
I recoiled from each of these explanations but still could not pinpoint what exactly had motivated me to visit this re-creation of the site where so many people had met their brutal ends. It took two hours of walking through the installation, moving from one area to the next, to understand.
Why Hamas is absent
The exhibition begins in a small, dark holding room where visitors gather before entering the main space. A large wall panel provides the barest introduction to orient the viewer. After a long night of intense music, dancing and revelry — the text reads — just as the sun was coming up over the horizon, the rave party was shattered when the “Angel of Death” swooped in, firing a barrage of missiles, which were precursors to the “inconceivable horror” that was soon to follow.
Referring to the attackers as “The Angel of Death” matters. From these very first words, the story turns away from naming the perpetrators. Hamas is absent, as is any wider political context. That absence speaks for itself. This exhibition does not weigh in on Israel’s actions after Oct. 7. Its focus, instead, lies solely on the experiences of those who were abused, terrorized, kidnapped, and killed.
Passing through heavy drapery, visitors enter the festival grounds in the early hours of Oct. 7. Sand is spread underfoot, and small tents are strewn across the landscape. Yoga mats, sweaty T-shirts, flip-flops, cereal boxes and other personal belongings litter the ground. Burned-out cars and bullet-ridden porta-potties mark failed hiding places. Cigarettes and empty bottles lie scattered at the bar, as though party-goers were present just moments before.
Objects alone cannot tell the whole story; Screens scattered through the wreckage reveal the unfolding terror. Some mounted on stands, and others glowing inside the tents or dangling on wires play videos on a loop. One woman hiding between bushes, speaks into her own camera, “I’m filming so that later there will be a video of all this.” Another captured himself huddled with others in a trash bin.
More footage comes from the Go Pro cameras of the terrorists themselves. Taken from a pickup truck zigzagging across the road, one of these recordings shows terrified people running, trying to escape. Some are shot and collapse to the ground as the vehicle speeds past.
Additional screens feature survivor testimonies. One tells how her husband took a fatal bullet so she could flee, another lived by keeping cover beneath dead bodies.
This recounting represents what unfolded that day. At the Nova festival alone over 400 were killed, and 43 were kidnapped. What popularly came to be referred to as a single attack, fractured into thousands of separate experiences, each person caught by surprise, and left to confront the terror on their own. The confusion is conveyed through the disorienting structure of the exhibit itself. Visitors are not given a clear route through the space, or directions about where to look first and then next. Nor do we progress as a group. I am among strangers and without a guide, leaving each of us to absorb the fragments of horror in our own way.
Then comes the pivot. Visitors turn a corner, and the exhibition shifts to a tightly organized space that directs viewers along a deliberate path. A map marks where each festival-goer met their fate. No longer immersed inside the horror, we now see its larger shape. After the map, rows of tables are arranged, holding neat piles of folded sweatshirts, lines of eyeglasses, and carefully arranged pairs of shoes. No labels explain, and none are needed. It’s clear that these personal items are the pieces picked up after the massacre, sorted by volunteers who handled each with care.
Order in the aftermath
Now I am beginning to understand. Walking through the disorienting chaos was necessary to appreciate the ways in which order is made in the aftermath. Not only through collecting and tending to the objects left behind, but to the affected people as well. A wall display shows photos of the 44 hostages taken from Nova, with a message that the “Nova Community” holds all “their pain, their courage and their hope.”
In fact, the more than 3,000 revelers who attended the Nova rave were not a community at all. They came from different backgrounds, from all over the country and abroad, with no prior connection to one another. But the survivors, the bereaved, and the families of the kidnapped have gathered in the aftermath under the auspices of “The Tribe of Nova Foundation,” to offer each other support. Established by the festival’s producers immediately after the attack, the foundation provides therapy, healing services, and memorial events, all needed even now after the ceasefire.
Exiting the last dark portion of the exhibit, we walk beside a long board laid out on the floor, arranged with memorial candles and hundreds of notes written by fellow visitors. Most echo the installation’s message: “Wrapping you in love.” “Remembering all those who lost their lives and who are still healing,” and “We will dance again.”
But one hand-scrawled message breaks through: “Fuck Hamas.”
This stops me. Not because I don’t share the rage — I do. But the sentiment feels jarring here, disrupting a sense of sanctity whose contours are fully revealed in the final room.
Here, black drapes and heavy shadows give way to earth tones, warm lights, jute carpets, and macramé lanterns. Small coffee tables and wicker chairs are arranged around the space, as though we have entered a living room. Having left the horrors of Oct. 7 behind, this is a room for the living. It is also a shiva — a ritual space where visitors sit with mourners and let them speak.
People take seats, facing a Nova survivor who is regularly present at the front of the room. Articulate and composed, she begins with photos of her best friend whom she lost in the attack, and ends with a story of her own survival, and a message of not taking life for granted.
Here, the hesitations and doubts I carried into the exhibition fall away. I now understand what brought me here, and why so many others have come. It is not morbid curiosity, nor propaganda meant to justify war. It is the need to sit shiva. This space draws its power from gathering and caring for the scattered objects, and from bringing the bereaved together to witness, mourn, and remember.
The Nova Exhibition is a contemporary phenomenon, employing modern technology and immersive design to respond to contemporary trauma. Yet it draws on ancient traditions of telling and listening to stories, sitting together, gathering what was scattered, and working to stitch ourselves whole again. This cultural work remains relevant even now — more than two years later, with nearly all hostages home and bodies laid to rest. The exhibition will travel to new cities, and it should. Grief continues to unfold, and mourning takes time.
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Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system
(JTA) — Jews in Ireland reported over 100 antisemitic incidents through a communal reporting system within six months after it launched, according to a new report.
The findings published early Monday by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland constitute the first attempt to document antisemitic incidents in Ireland.
Irish Jews, a small community of about 2,200, reported 143 incidents between July 2025 and January 2026. These were dominated by verbal abuse, vandalism, threats, exclusion or discrimination and direct digital hate messages. Physical assault was less common, with only three instances reported.
All incidents were self-reported to the JRCI, which cannot independently investigate or adjudicate them. Ireland does not have an official state mechanism for recording antisemitic incidents, the group said. And while the police record hate crimes based on nationality, ethnicity or religion, they do not isolate crimes motivated by antisemitism.
The JRCI said that 30% of incidents were triggered by cues of Jewish identity or Israeli origin, such as a Jewish symbol, an accent or speaking Hebrew in public. Such patterns often crossed the boundaries of hate driven by nationality, ethnicity and religion.
“These dynamics cannot be adequately addressed through generalized anti-racism frameworks alone,” JRCI chair Maurice Cohen said in a statement. “Antisemitism presents distinct characteristics requiring targeted policy responses.”
Cohen called for “a dedicated, standalone national plan to combat antisemitism in Ireland.”
Of the reported incidents, 25 included “Holocaust distortion” or antisemitic conspiracy theories. These findings add to a Claims Conference survey in January, which said that 9% of Irish adults believed the Holocaust was a myth, while another 17% believed the number of Jews killed had been greatly exaggerated. Half of Irish adults did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
At the same time, a November 2025 survey by the European Commission surfaced broad recognition of antisemitism in Ireland. 41% of respondents said that antisemitism was a problem in the country and 47% said it had increased over the past five years.
At a ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, Ireland’s taoiseach (or prime minister) Micheál Martin said, “I am acutely conscious that our Jewish community here in Ireland is experiencing a growing level of antisemitism. I know that elements of our public discourse has coarsened.”
Martin has strenuously criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying at the United Nations last year that Israel committed genocide and demonstrated “an abandonment of all norms, all international rules and law.” Catherine Connolly, a socialist politician who has faced backlash for saying Hamas is “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” was elected as Ireland’s president in October.
Ireland has historically supported the Palestinians, a stance often linked to the country’s own history of British imperial rule, and formally recognized a Palestinian state in 2024.
In Martin’s Holocaust commemoration speech, he also condemned the most recent event to inflame the Irish Jewish community. Late last year, a proposal to rename Herzog Park in Dublin — named for Chaim Herzog, the son of the first Irish chief rabbi who became Israel’s sixth president in 1983 — was decried by Irish Jews who said it would erase Irish Jewish history. The proposal was later tabled.
Martin, who also denounced the proposal when it was active, said the Jewish community “has every right to be deeply concerned and to express that concern.”
Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and an Irish Jew who grew up in Dublin, said the JRCI report showed a picture of antisemitic incidents that were separate from “a debate about the policies of Israel or a debate about the Palestinian state.”
“When you have discontinuation of service because somebody is heard speaking Hebrew, or has a Jewish-identifying symbol on them, that’s not about a political position on the spectrum towards Israel,” said Taylor. “That’s something that crosses into antisemitism.”
Ireland’s chief rabbi Yoni Wieder said the report reflected experiences he already heard from his congregants.
“The report does not claim that antisemitism has become a daily reality for all Jewish people in Ireland — it has not,” said Wieder. “What it does show is that antisemitism surfaces often enough, and in ordinary enough settings, that it cannot be dismissed as rare or confined to the margins of society. This means that for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should.”
The post Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system appeared first on The Forward.
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Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Spirits ran high inside a large public bomb shelter in the Israeli coastal city of Jaffa, with loud chatter, singing and greetings of “Happy Iran Holiday,” an incongruous soundtrack to the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran and the hundreds of missiles that followed.
The room itself looked much cheerier than most shelters, with a ball pit and bright Gymboree mattresses left over from its other job in peacetime, when it doubles as a kindergarten.
A day earlier, the shelter became the accidental venue for a bar mitzvah celebration, when worshipers from the synagogue across the road took refuge there.
One particularly raucous group was made up mostly of American-Israelis from the neighborhood. One of them, Steph Graber, said she was in a good mood despite being exhausted from middle-of-the-night runs to the shelter.
“I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the adrenaline of war or something,” she said on Sunday morning. “But also it’s amazing to see the U.S. and Israel as allies working together to reduce the threat from Iran.”
Graber said she had been sheltering elsewhere but had “FOMO” about not being with her friends, so she switched over in the brief lull between sirens.
Martine Berkowitz, a friend of Graber’s, also said the community around her was what made the disruption feel manageable. Sirens kept interrupting even basic tasks, she said, including her attempt to take a shower, which she tried five times.
“My friends live on my corner, so I’m doing great. We’re all together all the time,” she said. During the last Iran flare-up in June, she didn’t have that kind of built-in circle nearby, she said. “Being alone then was really rough.”
The mood wasn’t confined to Jaffa. Across the country, similar scenes played out in shelters and spread on social media, including one from Nachlaot in Jerusalem of people singing “For the Jews There was Light and Joy,” a Purim song marking the story’s turn after Haman’s plot to kill the Jews was thwarted. The parallel to the current moment, as the Jews once again sought to topple a Persian rule who had called for their death, was not lost on anyone.
In a sprawling underground parking lot turned shelter at Dizengoff Center in central Tel Aviv, Shabbat prayers gave way to dancing and songs of “Don’t Be Afraid, Oh Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai.” Saul Sadka, who was there, posted a video of the revelers, captioning it “joy and stoicism.”
Sadka later said he was struck by the “sense of solidarity,” and noted that it was Shabbat Zachor, when Jews read the passage about Amalek, a nemesis that they are commanded never to forget. “People seem willing to suffer for a while if it means the defeat of the IRGC,” he said.
Another bomb shelter in Tel Aviv struck a less pious tone, turning into a makeshift night club with red lights, a DJ and people dancing.
In one video, one of hundreds of comedic shelter clips circulating online, a comedian quipped, “The nation of Israel lives” — but only as long as the shelter “has wifi and the iPads have battery.”
Natalie Silverlieb was in the mamak, the communal reinforced safe room on her building’s floor. She said the logistics of repeated alerts had become harder since she became a mother.
“Doing this with a baby is crazy,” she said. The room was packed, including other babies and dogs, and she and her partner tried to follow a system that would get their baby back to sleep quickly.
“I’m so, so, so exhausted,” she said. “When I was doing this on my own the last time, I could at least come back to my apartment and just lay on the couch. But now there’s no laying on the couch. It’s go, go, go.”
For Silverlieb, the uncertainty of the past few weeks hadn’t disappeared so much as changed shape. “The waiting for it to end is more stressful than the waiting for it to begin,” she said. “I just hope it ends quickly. It’s a lot, period.”
In a nearby grocery store, another siren, the 30th or so in as many hours, sent shoppers scrambling. In the residential building next door, the shelter downstairs was decrepit and doorless. Children played limbo with a strip of red cloth. One woman began pitching HAAT, a new, mostly Arab-run delivery service she said was giving Wolt a run for its money. A few people pulled out their phones to download the app, trading jokes about whether it would deliver to shelters, and during sirens. Because it is Ramadan, Muslims in Israel are doubly on edge, from fasting on top of the missiles.
Sasha, who lives in the building, said she was “half happy” the waiting was over. The repeated dashes up and down the stairs, she joked, were at least getting her to her daily goal of 10,000 steps. Still, she said, it “won’t help us if the [Iranian] regime doesn’t fall.”
A Ukrainian who grew up under Soviet rule, taught her what it meant to live without freedom, she said. “We want to see the Iranian people free and a better Middle East for everyone.”
Evyatar said he doubted the regime would fall “unless the Iranian citizens themselves finish the job.”
Ma’or, another neighbor, said he would “happily sit in my bomb shelter if it meant giving my Iranian friends, both in Iran and out, a chance at a normal life.” He pointed to a friend in Tehran who works as a tattoo artist, an illegal trade under the regime.
“I mean, he’s not even free to give someone a tattoo without going underground,” he said. “I’m baffled by the people cheering [on] the IRGC. People who say this war is illegal are out of their goddamn minds.”
Evyatar said he began Saturday uneasy, but grew calmer as the hours passed and he gauged the pattern of the strikes. The alerts came far more often than the 12-day war, but the blasts felt less intense. “At the beginning I felt scared, like it was June all over again.” Over time, he said, he has learned to tell the difference between the sounds of interceptions, shrapnel and direct impacts.
As he spoke, a loud boom hit outside, rattling the shelter and stopping the conversation. “That, for example, was a June sound,” he said.
It turned out to be shrapnel coming down not far away. The impact was part of a wider series of strikes across central Israel, including one that turned lethal in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, when a public bomb shelter was hit. Nine people were killed including multiple from the same family. Dozens more were wounded, and others still were unaccounted for.
In Beit Shemesh, the strike changed the atmosphere in a city that had so far heard only occasional sirens, during both this round and the last one.
Netanel Alkoby, a Beit Shemesh resident who spent 12 years in the reserves with the Home Front Command, said he has always taken alerts seriously, but that over time a degree of complacency still set in. The strike, he said, “changed our perspective a lot,” forcing him to be more careful, more on guard, and to treat every warning “with the utmost seriousness.”
In the underground shelter at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, a sign overhead read “the safest shelter in existence.” Patients hobbled in, some with casts and crutches. With doctors also sheltering there, patients used the moment to buttonhole them with questions.
One staffer watched a line of women form to speak to a physician. “Poor thing, he can’t even enjoy the siren in peace,” she said.
Back in the central Jaffa shelter, a couple in black leather and dark glasses stood apart from the banter around them.
“Any fear and terror that Israeli citizens are feeling right now is a direct result of this violent racist Islamophobic power hungry greedy fascist government,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, referring to the Netanyahu-led coalition.
Asked whether she thought attacking Iran was a bad idea, she said: “I think it’s a bad idea to attack anyone in 2026. We teach toddlers not to fight and here we have fully grown men doing this, dooming all of us.”
“It’s time we take the power from aging white men,” she said.
Nearby, Martine Berkowitz agreed — in part. “Yep, they are behaving like toddlers. And they are aging white men. Who are fighting evil brown men. If it brings freedom to Iran then it was worth it. But if it doesn’t, then it was all for nothing.”
The post Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu: ‘Our Forces Are Striking the Heart of Tehran With Increasing Strength’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israeli forces had “eliminated the dictator Ali Khamenei” along with dozens of senior officials of Iran’s regime during a statement delivered from the roof of the Kirya, Israel’s defense headquarters.
“Yesterday, we eliminated the dictator Khamenei. Along with him, dozens of senior officials from the oppressive regime were eliminated,” Netanyahu said after a meeting with the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff, and the Director of Mossad. He added that he had issued instructions to continue the offensive.
According to Netanyahu, Israeli forces are “now striking at the heart of Tehran with increasing intensity,” a campaign he said will “increase further in the days to come.”
The Prime Minister also acknowledged the toll of the conflict on Israel, calling recent days “painful” and offering condolences to the families of victims in Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh, while wishing a speedy recovery to those injured.
Netanyahu emphasized that the operation mobilizes “the full power of the Israel Defense Forces, like never before,” in order to “guarantee our existence and our future.” He also highlighted US support, noting “the assistance of my friend, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and of the American military.”
“This combination of forces allows us to do what I have hoped to accomplish for 40 years: strike the terrorist regime right in the face,” Netanyahu concluded. “I promised it — and we will keep our word.”