The exhibition on Hamas’s massacre at the Nova festival is a must-see – for everyone

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The bullet-holed porta-potties and burned-out cars – all actual artifacts – speak for themselves. But in this exhibition, so do the victims and survivors. Short videos made by festivalgoers at the scene and witness testimonies reveal horror upon horror.

Abduct her or kill her? Two Hamas terrorists discussed about a woman they caught, the exhibit recounts. They shot her in the head. And laughed.

Some 3,500 young people had gathered in Israel’s Negev desert for an electronic music festival over a Jewish holiday. An event highlight was dancing as the sun rose. But on Oct. 7, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., the music stopped. It was replaced by siren blares.

For hours, festivalgoers were hunted. More than 400 people were killed (among them security personnel and would-be rescuers), including, ultimately, some of the 43 people kidnapped and taken to Gaza. Victims were tortured, mutilated, raped, burned alive. Israel was traumatized. The world should have been, too.

The massacre is recounted at the excellent but excruciating Nova Music Festival Exhibition, a travelling testament that is currently in Toronto.

Nova exhibition commemorates the moment the music stood still at Israeli rave

With the vitriol aimed at even the victims of this horror (“they were dancing near an open-air prison,” for instance) and the rape denial from progressives who have otherwise #MeToo’d emphatically, this is a memorial everyone should see. We owe it to these kids – and their parents – to bear witness. To what rescuers found, as the exhibit details: young women tied to trees, naked, spread-eagled. Men whose genitals were cut off. A bag full of heads.

The exhibition, previously installed in several U.S. cities, is in Toronto until June 22, extended because of interest.

But what kind of interest, I wondered on a Saturday morning visit. Because the crowd appeared to be almost completely, and perhaps totally, Jewish. (This is based entirely on my Jewdar, purely anecdotal and unscientific, although generally pretty spot on.)

What is the point of such an exhibition if only people who are already mourning bother to see it?

I was wrong, I am gratified to report. While initially the crowds were overwhelmingly Jewish, the non-Jewish audience has grown to about 20 to 25 per cent of attendees, the exhibition’s lead Canadian representative Jesse Brown told me. Although of course, these are not hard facts (ticket-buyers are obviously not asked about their ethnicity), Mr. Brown has been observing this. Church groups have come through, he says. More than 50 Italian developers the other night. Hundreds of police officers, from chiefs to cadets. A lot of BIPOC visitors, Mr. Brown reports.

And, thankfully, politicians – including Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow (as well as the mayors of Vaughan and Markham and many city councillors), Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, MPs and MPPs. The Prime Minister toured the exhibit on Monday, the same morning that in Ottawa, the National Holocaust Monument was vandalized. “Thank you for bearing witness to these unspeakable horrors,” Mark Carney wrote on an exhibition wall. “May a new dawn arise and their memories be blessings.”

“I observed him wiping tears from his face,” Mr. Brown told me.

Mr. Brown, 44 (not the Jesse Brown who founded the media company Canadaland), saw the exhibit in New York and it resonated with him as both the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and a former electronic music festival producer. He helped bring it to Toronto. After it closes this month, he hopes to take a smaller version across Canada.

A few prominent musicians have also toured the show, Mr. Brown says. But they requested that their visits not be publicized. “I think that also just highlights this culture of fear that unfortunately should not exist. This is the largest massacre in music history.”

To Mr. Brown’s knowledge, as of Wednesday, no NDP members had visited the exhibit.

This week, when Greta Thunberg, sailing to Gaza, dared to use the word “kidnapped” after her boat was boarded by Israeli officials, it was almost comically embarrassing. But nothing is funny about any of this.

In Israeli custody, Ms. Thunberg – who has scolded world leaders for ignoring evidence of the climate catastrophe – refused to watch footage of the Oct. 7 massacre, dismissing it as propaganda.

“It’s not propaganda if the people who did this filmed it themselves,” points out Mr. Brown, correctly. “[It’s] their own first-person view of exactly what happened. It’s factual documentation.”

The Nova exhibition is not political. It is not meant to change your mind about the horrors the Israeli government is inflicting upon Gaza – more than 55,000 people have now been killed in the subsequent war, Hamas Health Ministry officials say. You will not see Israeli flags on display. It’s a memorial to a bunch of kids – many of whom were not Israeli or Jewish – who were murdered on a holiday weekend when they should have been dancing.