‘Each of these faces has a story’: Nova show opens in DC

Noa Beer, a survivor of the Oct. 7 attack at the Nova festival, points to the picture of one of her friends, Avidan Tordjman, whom Hamas terrorists killed, in the Nova Exhibition: The Moment Music Stood Still, which opened in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2025. Photo courtesy of Jonathan D. Salant.

By JONATHAN D. SALANT

JNS

Noa Beer walked past the replica of the stage where entertainers prepared to entertain some 4,000 people at a music festival in an Israeli national park. Psychedelic lights rotated around the “Nova” logo, the community that arranged the concert. The nearby bar held actual glasses from the festival, a tablet damaged by bullets and the menu for the festival.

She had been there in the early morning of Oct. 7, 2023, having booked one of the disc jockeys for the Nova music festival in Israel.

Beer walked to another room. There, the walls were covered with 411 rectangles, most containing pictures. These symbolized the people killed at the festival when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages.

Pictures of the 53 hostages, whom Hamas still holds in Gaza, are on a wall in another room of the Nova Exhibition: The Moment Music Stood Still, which opened on June 14 in Washington, D.C.

Beer, 30, from Tel Aviv, reached up to the picture of a friend of hers, Avidan Tordjman, 26. Even in the head-and-shoulders picture, he looked tall and thin. Electric candles on the floor helped illuminate the scene.

One Community

“This is the room I feel the hardest to be in,” she told JNS. “These are my friends. They look so alive in the pictures as they’re smiling. They’re not here anymore. That’s the hardest thing. Each of these faces has a story.”

These are the stories the organizers of the Nova festival are telling in the exhibit now in Washington, which experienced a fatal anti-Semitic attack in May when a gunman shouting “free, free Palestine” killed two Israeli embassy staffers about the same age as most of the festival goers, whose pictures hung on the wall.

“It’s definitely more poignant, and also, I feel like this strengthens the Jewish community here—that we are not afraid to come and show who we are. We are not afraid to be the community that we are,” Beer said. “This makes it just that much more important for us to be here.”

Beer was on stage at the festival when she first saw the missiles at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7. Then came gunshots, and it became clear that this was not just another incident of Hamas lobbing missiles over the border.

She quickly ran to her car with the DJ, picked up some wounded people on the road and dodged gunfire from armed Hamas terrorists, as she made her way out, Beer told JNS.

Escape

She said that she worried that a missile would drop from the air onto her car or that a group of well-armed terrorists was up around the next bend, ready to attack. (Like Beer, the DJ was shot at but not wounded and survived the attack.)

“It’s practically a miracle that I’m standing here talking to you,” Beer told JNS.

“I was completely sure I was dead. When I got to the hospital, I did have a moment of relief,” she said. “The relief turned to deep, deep, deep sorrow.”

Beer went to 12 funerals after Oct. 7. “I had to choose between all of my friends, because we had funerals one on top of each other,” she said.

Fighting With Love

Because of her fluency in English, Beer was asked to answer media questions beginning the day after the attack. She continues to do so, and one of her roles in Washington is to talk about the exhibit and Nova.

“I feel like I was left here to be able to bring our community and the rest of the world to the light and to spread more light, because what happened that day is a direct action from hate,” she said. “You can’t fight hate with more hate. We need to be the stronger ones and spread the love.”

One of the festival organizers, Nimrod Arnin, also survived the attack, fleeing gunshots as he drove wounded victims away from the site. Arnin is a founder of the Nova tribe community, formed in 2021, which he described as believing in “love for mankind, love for the earth, love of the country, love for music, of course,” and engaging in community service projects among its other activities.

In another generation, one would have called them children of the Sixties.

After the massacre, Nova set up a foundation and continues to raise money to help the survivors and families of the victims.

It wasn’t lost on Arnin that the exhibit is taking place in a city whose Jewish community is still mourning the loss of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, gunned down last month after an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.

“This is the best answer” to that attack, Arnin told JNS. “What is the definition of terror? Terror is a group of people who want to frighten us.”  The exhibition shows the resilience of the Jewish people, according to Arnin. “No one can stop us,” he said.

Remnants

The exhibit consists of the artifacts that volunteers quickly collected and preserved following the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It was done “in order to make sure it won’t happen again,” Arnin told JNS. “Nobody can deny it, nobody forgets.”

The remnants on display in the show fill two floors of a building just steps from the arena where Washington’s basketball and hockey teams play, and which houses several major concerts a year.

There are the tents that attendees slept in, including one who brought along a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh and burned-out hulks of cars that Hamas terrorists set ablaze as the occupants, who sought to flee the killing field, were burned alive. The show contains bullet-riddled portable toilets and a concrete bomb shelter that some of the festival participants unsuccessfully sought to hide in.

The one on display in Washington was where Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American-Israeli, was captured by Hamas and later executed in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces found his body in a Hamas tunnel.

And then there are the shoes that festival goers left behind, arranged on a long table in a manner similar to the shocking and disturbing display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum just two miles away.

“We’re taught about the Holocaust from a very young age,” Beer said. “You can’t try to imagine something like that. Then something like this happens, and you see it with your own eyes.”

“I never thought I’d see true evil,” she told JNS. “I never thought I’d see murder right in front of my eyes. We’re too young and too loving and too happy to see things like this.”

A perpendicular table contains shoes and clothing, as well as other artifacts left behind.

Liat Ekheizer, a resident of Bnei Zion, a central Israeli moshav, helped collect the artifacts beginning the day after the attack.

“All citizens were looking to do something,” she told JNS. “We all felt so hopeless.”

They went through backpacks. They looked into the pockets of clothing. They gathered up jewelry and other personal items. “The things that make you you,” Ekheizer said. “I could see myself in those small bags.”

The exhibit previously ran in Tel Aviv, New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, It is slated to close in Washington on July 6.

While the exhibit ran in Los Angeles, one of the released hostages reclaimed her sweatshirt from the table, and the father of one of the victims found his son’s shoes in Miami. The latter had given them to his son, who wore them to the concert.

“Look at these shoes or these clothes and see yourself in them, because this is something we all do,” Beer told JNS.

“We Continue Dancing”

“Most people like music. If you want to go to a festival, you want to go in and enjoy it with your friends. You don’t want to be running away from terrorists,” she said. “That’s what these people had to do. Think that you had to run away so quickly that you had forgotten your shoes or your bag or your bra.”

The exhibit ends in what is called the healing journey room—a chance to read about the Nova foundation and reflect on what visitors just saw.

“In the end, this has nothing to do with politics or what you think about Israel or what you think about the Jews,” Beer told JNS. “This has to do with a group of people that went to dance at a music festival, and 411 of them did not come home.”

The exhibit and the foundation show the world “that we are here to spread our light and our love and show people that we still have hope, that we will continue dancing,” she said. “We will continue having festivals. In the end, love will override the hate, and hopefully one day, we will be happy again like we were before.”

Beer believes she survived to continue spreading peace and love.

“Of course it’s hard. It’s devastating,” she told JNS. “But I think we were left here to continue spreading light, and I think we were left here so we can live the lives that they will never be able to. I think of them every day with everything I do. With every place that I see, every beautiful sunset that I see, I imagine my friends seeing it with me.”

“This is what they would have wanted,” she said.