It is not normal to pass several groups of police officers before entering an exhibition in the capital city. But this is no ordinary exhibition.
Such is the attention surrounding the Nova show that rumours spread police had asked organisers to remove the large sign outside. In fact, the sign remained – but it was only installed on opening day.
Titled 06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still, the exhibit marks the minute Hamas gunmen attacked more than 3,000 festival-goers gathered in Israel’s Negev desert on 7 October 2023, killing 413 people.
Inside, you are first brought to the hours before the attack: revellers dancing to trance music, hugging, grinning, escaping into the desert night. Then you push through a black curtain and step into a reconstruction of the festival grounds.
Tents and camp chairs sit in the dirt, while scattered iPhones play footage of the attack beside burnt-out cars. There are knick-knacks too: a beaded bracelet, a trinket tray in the shape of a Buddha, bottles of drink, and even a tiny red British postbox. All around, the sound blasts – thumping EDM alongside the piercing screams as terrorists approached.
A burned out car recovered from the scene on display (Nova Exhibition)[Missing Credit]
A room to the side recreates the fatal bomb shelter where Hersh Goldberg-Polin and around 30 others hid from terrorists and Aner Shapira heroically threw eight grenades out of the shelter. A silent video shows the immediate aftermath: blood pooled across the floor where 16 people were murdered and four were kidnapped.
Then the space opens into a memorial wall of the dead, their faces shining with young hope in the light of candles. In the middle of the room sit dirty flip-flops, Adidas sliders and Blundstone boots, shoes so synonymous with Israeli youth.
What is striking is how few of the faces are familiar. Aside from those who died in captivity or had British connections, most names have scarcely appeared in UK headlines. Row upon row of young faces stretches across the walls.
“Each picture, there is a family, there is a world behind the picture,” Ofir Amir, the exhibition’s co-founder and a Nova survivor, told the JC.
Amir was shot in both legs as he escaped the festival in a car. His friend, who was sitting in the front seat, was shot dead, and Amir very nearly died from his bleeding wounds. He lay wounded for three hours, thinking of his wife, who was nine months pregnant at the time. Four weeks later, he attended the birth of their daughter, Eliana.
The trauma, he says, is something he has had to “learn to live alongside” and helping to build the exhibition has also become part of his recovery.
“To commemorate and bring the voices of my friends that are no longer here – it is very healing for me, and also to share this with the world and change one person’s mind – it gives you purpose and strength,” he said.
The exhibition ends with footage from a Nova healing concert held six months after the massacre. Visitors put on silent-disco headphones and listen once more to trance music – this time accompanied by scenes of survivors dancing together.
For Amir, that transition from horror to hope lies is the centre of the exhibition.
“We want people to walk out of here with a whole experience, the bad but also seeing the light at the end. It is a journey from the light to the darkness and back to the light.”
London is the tenth city to host the show and the exhibition’s organisers have invited schools, universities, police officers and educators to attend.
The Nova Exhibition features the actual staging from the event (Photo: Nova Exhibition)[Missing Credit]
There are some who deny or downplay the atrocities of October 7 – and for them, this show is evidence that it really happened. At the end of the tour, visitors can speak directly with survivors, former hostages, and relatives of victims, many of whom travel with the exhibition despite the emotional cost of repeatedly recounting their experiences.
One of those who will be speaking at the exhibition for the first time is British Lisa Marlowe, whose 26-year-old British-Israeli son, Jake, was murdered on October 7. Nearly three years later, with Jake buried in London, she visits his grave every week. Yet it was only when the exhibition arrived in the capital that she felt he truly returned.
“Seeing the photos of him, it is like he has come home. I’ve got my son home for six weeks,” Lisa Marlowe told the JC.
She last spoke to him at 6.30am on October 7.
“He said there were ‘loads of rockets and not to worry, he will be in touch, speak later.’”
“We are still waiting for him to call,” she added.
Jake made aliyah because of concerns about growing antisemitism in Britain after he saw a parade of cars draped in Palestinian flags driving along Finchley Road calling for Jewish girls to be raped. Charges were dropped against all of the suspects.
“He was 24 years old, and he said that it wasn't safe here. He didn't like it, and he was going. He was going to Israel.”
Now, she says, she is horrified by what she sees unfolding in London. “Who understands that in 2026, what is going on with these marches and everything else?”
She hopes the exhibition, which she intends to attend every day for its entire opening, might force people to confront the reality of October 7.
“One hopes they come and bear witness to what happened. They have to be here, they have to see it. If they saw it, maybe they would believe. If they met people that had escaped – if they could see all those beautiful faces on that wall.”
Hila Fakliro, who worked as a bartender at the festival, is also speaking about what happened to her, something she says which has become inseparable from her own survival.
“It's part of why I'm still alive. The fact I can stand and share what's happened to me and my community and to my friend that's no longer with me, that's the only meaning,” she said.
For her, the exhibition’s final scenes of the healing concert and the Nova community offer proof that life continues.
“In the end of the exhibition, you can see that the Nova survivors, as a community, are rising. We are dancing, we are smiling. So there is a hope.
“And for the other people, who don't believe, the only thing I want them to do is come and see. You don't have to change your opinion, you don't have to make a noise, just come to bear witness, and then you choose to believe or not.”
Another survivor, Doron Mizrahi, said helping bring the exhibition to audiences around the world had given him a sense of purpose after the attack.
“The best thing I can do right now with my life,” he said, is to help tell the story of Nova internationally.
“In the end, this is a piece of history, this is the truth.”
Book tickets at https://novaexhibition.com/london-exhibition
On June 3 the JC is hosting rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan and injured IDF soldier Ben Ladany – two young men whose lives were forever changed by October 7 and the war that followed. You can book tickets to hear their stories here
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