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A new exhibition in New York City featuring artifacts and testimonials from the tragic Hamas attack at the Nova Music Festival aims to ensure the massacre is not forgotten.
By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner
A new exhibition in New York City that features items and firsthand videos from the Hamas terrorist attack at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is not meant to be political and sets out to ensure that the massacre is remembered, according to organizers of the project.
“I think the events of Nova are not only being forgotten — they’re being ignored,” Jewish record executive and entrepreneur Scooter Braun, who helped bring the exhibit to New York after its 10-week run in Tel Aviv, told CBS’s Sunday Morning. He added that the exhibit has nothing to do with politics and is instead “about music.”
“Why are musicians not screaming from the top of their lungs that music should be a safe place?” he asked. “Just stop for a minute and ask yourself, on either side, do kids dancing deserve to die? And the answer is no. So just give [the exhibit] an opportunity and have empathy in your heart for all sides.”
The exhibit, titled “Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still,” takes a venue over 50,000 square feet near the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan and attempts to recreate the scene of the deadly terrorist attack at the music festival.
Artifacts taken from the site of the Hamas massacre are featured in the exhibit, including bullet-riddled bathroom stalls, scorched cars, signage, attendee tents, and personal belongings left behind such as shoes, clothes, and hats. The exhibit also highlights testimonies from survivors of the terrorist attack and a photo gallery of those murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7. Over 360 festival-goers were killed by Hamas that day and more than 40 others, including American citizens, were taken as hostages back to the Gaza Strip.
Braun told Sunday Morning he wanted to help bring the exhibit to New York City because he was outraged by the silence surrounding the Nova massacre. He said the international community has condemned concert massacres in the past — including the 2017 attack at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas and the bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that same year.
“Yet, the Nova festival had over 360 people killed, over 40 taken hostage. It’s the biggest massacre at a music festival in history and no one was saying anything,” Braun noted. “I just felt like I needed to do something.”
Nova survivor Daniel Dvir, 23, who hid from Hamas terrorists in a tree, also spoke to Sunday Morning, as did Hannie Ricardo, the mother of 26-year-old Nova victim Oriya Lipman Ricardo. Hannie talked about her daughter and other victims of the attacks saying, “They were radiant people, happy people. And they were butchered, massacred, raped, mutilated by monsters.”
“It was a wakeup call for the Jewish people,” she added. “We had to go to Gaza, to take care that we won’t be massacred again.” When asked about the Gazans affected by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas terrorists controlling the Palestinian enclave, she said, “I don’t appreciate any loss of life, but if a terrorist hides behind them, what can we do?”
“Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still” is located at 35 Wall Street in New York City. It opened to the public on April 21 for a four-week long presentation.
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