Danielle Gelbaum, 23, will never forget the sunrise on Oct. 7.
That morning as the sun began to light up an open field in Re’im Israel at 6:29 a.m. the Israeli danced alongside her sister and seven of her best friends. When Hamas attackers hunted down festival attendees, Gelbaum fled with her group to a nearby police station where they got help.
She was one of the more than 3,500 festival goers to survive the attacks that day, when Hamas terrorists killed 405 people and kidnapped 45 others.
While Gelbaum has tried to move on, she will never forget Oct. 7. And now an exhibition that tells the story of the tragic Nova psy trance festival is making its way across the country. The Nova Music Festival Exhibition comes to Los Angeles on Saturday, following a successful two-month run in New York City.
It recounts the narratives of the festival attendees who didn’t survive and those who bear the burden to this day — with an emphasis on the healing journey of the Nova tribe of ravers who scrambled to survive the Hamas attacks that went on for hours that morning.
Gelbaum had no idea that an act of terrorism would change her life forever.
“This was the first time I’m back on the dance floor and I’m seeing the sunrise, and I’m searching the sky for missiles, and I’m not seeing them, no missiles,” Gelbaum told TheWrap, after attending a new Nova Tribe festival in Tel Aviv in June. “There’s a sunrise with no missiles. It can happen. Who knew? Who knew? I thought that from now on, that’s it. Every music festival is going to be ruined by that [day] somehow.”
Gelbaum and Eilat Tibi, another survivor, spoke to TheWrap in Los Angeles at the exhibition site.
“When you come to the exhibit, you choose to look, you choose to take action,” Tibi said. “I want all of Hollywood to come and see what’s going on here in our community because I want this to be the next movie and series.”
Reut Feingold, the exhibition’s creative director, transformed a 50,000 square-foot warehouse space in Culver City into a stark remembrance of that day, recreating moments from the festival through a series of survivor testimonies and curated artifacts directly from the festival site. The Oct. 7 memorial exhibition, “06:29 am — The Moment Music Stood Still” originally premiered in Tel Aviv, but U.S. partners Scooter Braun, Joe Teplow and Josh Kadden brought it to the United States.
“The Nova exhibition is telling a story about a music festival, the largest massacre in music history, that just so happens to have been in Israel,” Zev Norotsky, the head of marketing for the L.A. leg of the exhibition, told TheWrap. “This is not a story about Israel. We’ve been able to successfully remove that entire piece of the narrative by focusing on a very simple thesis, which is we will dance again. By showing people what happened, we are truly changing hearts and minds.”
Bringing the exhibit to L.A., though, comes with its own challenges. Antisemitic hate crimes spiked 112% in Los Angeles in 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Representatives from the exhibit told TheWrap they are prepared and have learned from unprecedented anti-Israel protests in Manhattan.
Braun’s involvement in bringing the exhibition to the United States is personal, not only because of his Jewish faith but also because of his managerial relationship with Ariana Grande. The music mogul represented the popstar in 2017 when a suicide bomb killed 22 people at her concert in Manchester, England.
Braun, who has represented Justin Bieber and Kanye West among other major acts, has been outspoken in his support of victims and survivors of the 2017 UK attack and has criticized the music industry for not responding in a similar way to the attacks on the Nova Music Festival.
“On Oct. 7, the largest massacre in the history of music took place at the Nova Music Festival and in response, too many in our industry stayed silent,” Braun said in a statement. “Music must always be a safe place, and the silence was deafening.”
Braun will be honored at the 30th annual ADL Concert Against Hate in November for his work on the exhibition. His contribution to the U.S. installment brought more attention to the New York City sold-out run.
Inside the exhibit
Everything in the art exhibit, from unfurled makeup bags to baby shoes to leftover bottles of Campari, were taken directly from Re’im Israel to reproduce the aftermath of the tragic day as accurately as possible. Tents, hammocks and screens line the walls of the first hallway. Each screen shows real-time video from that day, not only from festival goers but from the body cameras of Hamas terrorists.
One screen shows the viral footage of Noa Argamani as she was taken hostage by the Hamas soldiers. Argamani was one of four hostages rescued by the Israeli Defense Forces in a daytime raid on two houses in the Nuseirat refugee camp on June 8.
Other graphic imagery and testimonies from survivors guide viewers through the exhibit.
A new addition to the L.A. leg of the exhibition is the “healing journey.” Since Oct. 7 the tribe of Nova music lovers has dedicated funds for therapy treatment for the tragedy’s survivors.
We met once, five total strangers, but somehow I feel more connected to them than friends, than my best friend in 20 years.
Danielle Gelbaum, Nova festival survivor.
The Nova Tribe hosted a healing concert June 27 in Tel Aviv that drew thousands of ravers. A video from the concert plays as part of the L.A. exhibition. The massive screen and the open space provide a stark contrast to the dark tone of the previous sections of the exhibition. Several survivors attended the healing concert, including Gelbaum and Tibi.
“I went back dancing one and a half months after Oct. 7,” Tibi, 34, told TheWrap. “The experience is that you come to the floor, you dance, you laugh, you celebrate with your friends, but you can 10 minutes later hug someone and cry, and we dance and share our experience and cry together.”
Listening to Tibi speak about their shared community, Gelbaum started to tear up, telling Tibi, “you’re making me emotional. This is the first time I’ve cried since I got here.”
Both Gelbaum and Tibi were in the crowd the morning when the missiles rained down near the festival site and armed attackers on paragliders and motorcycles descended near the Gaza border. Gelbaum told TheWrap that at times she thought this sense of danger was the new normal — until she returned to the dance floor just a few months later.
“I remember I saw the sun rise,” she said. “And I remember crying my eyes out.”
The “We Will Dance Again” mantra has extended beyond just the Nova Tribe. Murals and billboards across L.A. are sharing the message to direct attention back to the exhibition.
PTSD and survivors guilt
Ten months out from the tragedy, Nova tribe members are still learning to cope with the shame and anxiety of surviving when 405 of their own did not. Both Gelbaum and Tibi talked about the guilt that they still carry.
Gelbaum has attended several Nova community events since Oct. 7, but she described her healing journey as nonlinear. While both she and her sister share a trauma, they cope in different ways. When Gelbaum attended one of her first Nova community events since that day someone gave her a much needed, cathartic hug.
“That was, I think, the first step I did towards my healing journey — just accepting the love that I needed at the time because I didn’t believe in love anymore,” Gelbaum said. “How can you believe in love when you’re going to a music festival to dance, to celebrate, laugh, to celebrate life, to be with friends, family – literally my family, my sister – and you’re almost getting murdered or raped?”
Both Gelbaum and Tibi said they carried the weight of their survivor’s guilt long before getting help, but it was not until they interacted with other survivors that they realized survival could mean something more.
“I was ashamed that I survived,” Gelbaum said. When she finally found security in a Netivot police station the day of the attack, the first thing she asked for were scissors to cut off her festival wristband, she said. Her guilt was so overbearing that she felt the urge to physically distance herself from the darkness it represented.
“But after starting to go to the Nova events, meeting other survivors, I learned that being a Nova survivor isn’t a shame, it’s a strength,” she said. “Like I’m here. I’m alive. I’m on both my feet.”
Gelbaum was diagnosed with PTSD after the attacks on Oct. 7. She shared that even her own therapist cannot comprehend her trauma in the way that fellow survivors can.
“We met once, five total strangers, but somehow I feel more connected to them than friends, than my best friend in 20 years,” Gelbaum said of her travel day with fellow survivors headed to the L.A. opening of the exhibition. “Because my best friend would know what it is like to wake up from a nightmare, but she won’t know what it is like to wake up from a nightmare almost every other night.”
Tibi shared similar sentiments. She returned to her job at the military reserve, where she oversees a team of 20, just days following the brutal attacks. No one knew she was even at the festival that morning because she did not allow herself to fully accept the weight of her experience. Attending Nova community events and bonding with other survivors helped Tibi better process her traumas.
“It was the first time that I met someone that understands the shame that I had that I was out of there. That understood that I’m angry of myself, of times that I wasn’t being in action or maybe I was a danger to my friends,” Tibi said. “Only another survivor can understand what you feel about fear of your life and escape, and it’s still when I say that I don’t believe that I was there.”
After visitors make their way through the art exhibit, the curators have provided a “healing room” for further conversation and processing. For the L.A. installment of the exhibition, there will be a media lounge and podcast center, where creators can make content with survivors and have an open dialogue around the events of Oct. 7 and its implications 10 months later. Organizers said they hope content created in the exhibit will spark conversations beyond its walls.
Concerns about more antisemitic reactions
When the exhibit opened in New York City, several pro-Palestinian protestors lit smoke canisters and flares outside the exhibition. Prominent political leadership in the city condemned the protestors for “desecrating the graves” of the over 400 lives commemorated by the exhibit.
“You do not call for peace and wave flags of Hamas,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said. “You do not call for peace and then come to a memorial site. That’s like you are desecrating the graves.”
US. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also blasted the protest in a post on X, saying “callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism — plain and simple.”
The callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2024
Antisemitism has no place in our city nor any broader movement that centers human dignity and liberation.
“On a personal note, the thought of coming to this exhibit and protesting is disgusting because of the subject matter,” Norotsky said. “It’s one of those things that in big cities, you’re always going to have to contend with the reality and what I said earlier is it’s a very, very small minority that aims to create as much disruption as possible.”
“Music festivals are truly supposed to be safe spaces for everyone,” Norotsky said.
“06:29 am — The Moment Music Stood Still” does not currently have an end date, but representatives from the touring exhibition said it will be open at least through the anniversary of Oct. 7.
Tickets are available for purchase on The Nova Music Festival Exhibition website. Proceeds from the ticket sales will be donated to the Nova healing journey’s fund for survivors’ therapy.
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