Genocide at the Nova Music Festival Massacre

Recently, I visited the site of the Nova Music Festival massacre, the place where 378 people were murdered and many more wounded on October 7, 2023. Forty-four people were taken hostage by Hamas. Women were subjected to gender-based and sexual violence.

I cannot begin to describe how profoundly this site affected me on a personal level.

I am not someone who usually compares events to the Holocaust. I have led 23 educational trips to Poland, serving as an educator on all of them. To me, the Holocaust stands on its own, unparalleled in scope and meaning. Yet, as I reflect on my experience at the Nova site, I find myself reminded of places in Poland that I have visited and taught about. I do not wish to make a historical comparison, but rather to share personal reflections informed by those experiences.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer beauty of the site. For me, being out in nature is always a joy. But then we were told:

“This is where the campground was. This was where the stage stood. This was where people tried to flee and hide in the orchards. If you went this way, or that way, you would have been killed. The only way to escape was that way.”

I was reminded of the Łopuchowo Forest outside Tykocin, Poland, where 1,400 Jews were murdered on August 25, 1941, in what is known as the Holocaust by Bullets. Entire families were shot together and buried in three horrific pits that today serve as memorials to that tragedy — one that claimed some two million Jewish lives across Europe.

In both places, I felt as though nature — especially the trees — bore silent witness to the horrors and inhumanity they had seen.

The second thing that moved me were the memorial pictures and billboards of those who were murdered. They stood as silent reminders of the brutal inhumanity that occurred there. Most of the photos were of young people in their twenties, full of life and promise.

This brought to mind Treblinka. Today, nothing remains of that death camp, where more than 800,000 Jews were murdered. The memorial stones there each represent a town whose Jewish community perished.

Yet, I was saddened to learn that there is now an effort to downplay the Jewish tragedy at Treblinka. Recently, 300 crosses were planted there to commemorate Poles who died at the site. I have no objection to honoring Polish victims, but such displays risk distorting the historical proportions of Jewish and Polish losses. I have also heard that a new museum is being planned, one that will focus more heavily on Polish experiences and include a wall of names, mostly Polish, with only a few Jewish ones.

The problem is that, unlike Auschwitz, few records were kept at Treblinka. When 5,000 Jews a day were deported from Warsaw, no lists were made. Thus, a wall of names will inevitably be almost devoid of Jewish names, giving a misleading impression of what occurred there.

Finally, I thought of Auschwitz. At the Nova site, there was an ambulance where 18 young people had tried to flee. Hamas terrorists fired an RPG into it. All were killed; their bodies were burned beyond recognition. We were told it took Israeli authorities seven months to identify all the remains.

This reminded me of the countless Jews who were gassed and burned at Auschwitz, over 1.1 million people, murdered simply because they were Jewish.

As we left, two thoughts remained with me.

First, there is a profound difference between standing at a memorial site in Poland and standing at one in Israel. Despite the tragedy, I left the Nova site feeling the absolute necessity of having a “postage stamp” of a country called Israel, a place wherein Jews can live in safety and security and where Jewish lives can be defended. For those young people at the Nova Festival, Jewish self-defense failed them miserably. A state commission of inquiry, similar to the one formed after the Yom Kippur War, must be established immediately.

Second, in a very profound way, I felt I had come face-to-face with what genocide looks like in our own time. Young and old alike were murdered, brutally and without mercy. The killers reveled in their crimes, filming them on GoPro cameras.

I have little patience for those who misuse and cheapen the term genocide. Calling what has happened in Gaza “genocide” is an inversion of meaning and a trivialization of the Nazi Holocaust.

When I left the site of the Nova Festival, I knew that adult and teen trips to Israel must include a visit there. It has become, in my opinion, a site as essential as Yad Vashem, Masada, or the Kotel (Western Wall).

My visit deeply affected me. There, I encountered what modern antisemitism and genocide truly look like. I was reminded that Jewish freedom can never be taken for granted, especially in the face of those like Hamas and Iran who openly seek to erase Jewish life from the earth.