The Nova Exhibition Arrives in London

October 7th 2023 saw Hamas terrorists from Gaza enter Israel to murder 1,200 souls and take a further 250 hostage. At the time of the terrorist attack the Nova Music Festival, a celebration of dance and trance was in full swing just a few miles from the Gaza border.

As the sun rose on that terrible October day, the terrorists swarmed the festival massacring 413 predominantly young people and taking 44 hostages. Many hundreds more were wounded leading to the Nova Festival becoming perhaps the bloodiest of that day’s countless atrocities.

This week the Nova Music Festival Exhibition opened in central London. A remarkable tribute to that day’s victims, the exhibition  “06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still”, conceived and curated by artist Reut Feingold, offers a thoughtfully created recreation of aspects of both the festival itself, alongside deeply respectful displays of the day’s unimaginable barbarity.

Arriving at the exhibition, visitors are first ushered into a short movie screening describing the essence of the festival. The joy, happiness and exhilaration as the young people danced the night away is vividly recreated. As the sun rose over the Negev that morning, the carnival was to become carnage and visitors to the exhibition leave the screening room to enter what has been recreated as a typical festival campsite.

Trees and sand make up the room’s landscape, with individuals’ festival pop-up tents amidst the palms, all strewn with the messy mundanity of young people camping out for a couple of days … books, magazines, tubes of toothpaste, a backgammon set…the usual clutter. It’s a brilliant creation, for nestling within these tented collections of discarded personal trivia – all genuine artifacts, recovered from the Nova site – are video displays and mobile phone screens playing looping clips of the day’s violence in actual footage that had been recovered by the IDF from both the terrorists’ Go Pro cameras and the victims’ mobile phones. Within the clips the deceased have been treated with respect, these harrowing rolling extracts being blurred where necessary so as not to identify the victims.

A wall, lit by flickering memorial candles, displays pictures of all the victims – on another wall, images of those taken as hostages. Some of the names are familiar to us from events of the last 2 1/2 years. Above all, it is the sheer number of these beautiful young people, cut down as they danced, that is chilling. And that they were all someone’s child or sibling or parent reminds us all of how fragile and precious their lives were.

Other tableaux in the exhibition tell of the nightmare of that day – burned out car wrecks; an immaculately recreated festival bar, complete with a credit card swipe machine that we are all familiar with, only this one bears a bullet-shattered screen; and tables and tables of the victims’ shoes, sandals and clothes. To the side of the exhibition, a small room documents the rape and sexual torture that the terrorists inflicted that day. The heartbreak is overwhelming.

And yet, amidst this devastation, my visit to  “06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still” also offered some truly humbling glimpses of the finest in humanity.

Traveling with the exhibition are a group of remarkable volunteers, each prepared to share their own experiences of the impact of what happened at Nova that day and in the months following. There are a dozen or so of these noble individuals, I was only able to speak with four of them.

Yael Bonnet had been attending her first ever Nova Festival in 2023 when the terrorists attacked. She was fortunate enough to quickly drive away from the violence, but on encountering a pickup truck filled with armed terrorists on the road, she fled her car and with her friends ran nearly 20 kilometers on foot until they were rescued.

Shalev Moshe lost his elder brother Eden who was murdered at Nova. Both spoke openly of their grief and trauma, but also of their journeys of recovery since October 7th.

Yael had previously worked as a waitress in a Haifa restaurant, now she is the restaurant’s manager – a small but remarkable statement of strong defiant progress, a woman who will not allow herself to be broken by the horrors that she witnessed and endured. Both Yael and Shalev spoke of the therapeutic support they had received from the Tribe of Nova Foundation, formed in late 2023, to support the Nova survivors together with the families of both victims and survivors.

I next spoke with Taryn Thomas, a student from Stanford University in the USA and who had flown in to London from California that morning. Taryn is neither a Nova survivor nor a relative. Rather, she is an example of the power of the exhibition to effect change.

Up until 2024 Taryn had been a prominent and outspoken leader of pro-Palestinian rallies on campus. When the Nova Exhibition came to Los Angeles, the production team extended an open invitation to students to come and see it for themselves. Taryn came. She spent three hours inside and came out changed.

Taryn told me: “I was a part of the pro-Palestine encampment at Stanford University. October 7th of 2023, I was a sophomore and I think what kind of drew me to the movement was a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.

And fast forward, one of our protests had definitely gotten out of hand and caused about $700,000 in damages. 12 students had received felonies having spray-painted disgusting things such as “Death to Israel, Death to America” And I think that was my first time thinking that I just didn’t understand how this was liberating Palestine or saving anyone. And so I took a step back from the movement because so many students were suspended. And then, months later in October of 2024, I received an email inviting non-Jewish students to visit the Nova Exhibition.

I had heard about this festival, and I went with the purpose of looking for Zionist propaganda. I went with a closed mind and I thought I knew what I was going to see. I was looking almost to validate and strengthen my position as I looked for the Zionist lies. So I went, and I saw all of my assumptions being broken. I was just completely astounded by how horrific the events were.

And this was my first time ever seeing the October 7th footage and this was like a year later.

So I went in looking for propaganda and there was none. The exhibition didn’t argue with me. It showed me kids my age being hunted and I could see myself in them and that could have been me at a music festival dancing, and then fleeing for my life the next moment.

I read the goodbye messages and the last “I love yous” and I just felt like my heart broke. One of the main things that made me open my eyes was the audio clip of the terrorist calling his dad to celebrate that he had killed 10 Jews. And these were the ‘Palestinian martyrs’? This was ‘the resistance’ that we were calling for ‘by any means necessary’? This was who we were supporting? I couldn’t rationalize and even understand the actions of what I was witnessing.”

I asked Taryn what the impact had been upon her life, of so fundamentally changing her perspective on the pro-Palestine movement?

“It’s been incredibly hard. I lost pretty much every single friend that I had. I went to Israel in 2025 and posted about it and my best friend asked, “Is this you?” And I was like, “Yeah, do you want to talk about it? ” And she immediately blocked me.

I thought there would be an argument or a fight and I was wishing that had happened, I thought I would be given a chance for a conversation. Unfortunately, the pro-Palestinian ideology has people so wrapped up in it that they attach their identity, their morals, everything. And if you dissent at all, you’re persecuted socially. It’s like a social suicide.

It started with my best friend and then it turned into my classmates who posted on their social medias that I’m a genocide apologist and calling me a spineless loser. And it was really hard because I knew them. Of course, that’s their tactic, to shame and to silence. Any dissent, or question is to risk your social life.

And I think especially for every college student, that’s your whole world. It feels existential. And so I think going through that and losing that many people, I don’t know, but I feel like for every person I lost, I gained. I was welcomed with open arms in the Jewish community in ways that I would’ve never had imagined. I was invited to Shabbat dinner at Chabad and Hillel and made two of my best friends.

I just never knew that our movement was hateful. We had JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace. A left-wing, grassroots, activist antizionist organization in the United States composed of Jews who advocate for Palestinian rights and the liberation of the Palestinian people] alongside us and so I thought this was what Jews thought. I came to realize how antisemitic our movement was and how antizionism is antisemitism.”

I asked Taryn how she thought it may be possible to enlighten more people, particularly young people, who currently hold the misguided beliefs that she had once shared?

“I think it’s going to be an uphill battle. It is sad that it took me so long, but without people welcoming me with open arms, I wouldn’t be here today. And so I think there’s a silent majority that are scared to speak up, scared to admit that they were wrong, or they made a mistake. So if we want people to be deradicalized, we need to build an off ramp and let them know it’s okay to change your mind and to have nuance”.

My final conversation of the day was with Elkanah Bohbot who had been seized at Nova and kidnapped into Gaza, where he was held hostage for 738 days before his release on October 13th 2025.

Speaking to Elkanah it was hard to believe that it had been barely seven months since his release and that this time last year he was still being held in a Gazan terror tunnel. Elkanah spoke to me about both horror and of hope.

He told me: “When I come inside Gaza on the back of a car, the driver stopped after every 200 meters. Then the driver would put his head out and say “this guy here is Israeli, Israeli, Jewish, Israeli, Jewish.” And what happened? In that second, hundreds of children, hundreds, came with sticks to hit me. Children! A girl who was maybe five years old, hitting me with a stick. Hitting me with anything they could find and I could see the hate in their eyes.”

Like so many others in the diaspora, I had attended countless rallies in the two years following October 7^th, shouting “Bring Them [the hostages] Home”! To then be here, in central London, shaking Elkanah’s hand, and to listen to his testimony describing his years underground, not seeing the sky nor even his face in a mirror, and of suffering unspeakable degradation, my tears flowed.

But then came the hope. Elkanah spoke of Rebecca, his Colombian-born wife and of Re’em their son who was two years old when his father was taken hostage. Elkanah spoke smilingly of how his son had apparently been nagging his mother, saying “Why don’t I have any brothers or sisters?” – Rebecca is now pregnant, with their daughter due to be born in September.

Elkanah ended our conversation with these words:  “And when I come out from Gaza, Re’em, he’s come to me and say, “Dad, now you are here. I want the brothers.” And I tell him, “Don’t worry. Pray to the God and your brother or sister will come. Now, Rebecca is pregnant and THAT, is my victory!”

“06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still” is an astonishing and, sadly, unmissable exhibition. It stands not only as humbling documentary evidence and witness to the diabolical terrorism of Hamas on October 7^th, it also frames a narrative of hope for the future. It is only in London for six weeks, but just go. If you are already familiar with the events of October 7^th, still go – the exhibition will teach you more.

But even more importantly, take someone with you who has yet to learn of the horrors of that day.

The exhibition runs until 5th July 2026. You can buy tickets here