NORTH MIAMI, Fla. – It’s been more than one year since Hamas militants stormed Israel during a music festival, killing and even kidnapping hundreds of people.
There’s now a special exhibition in North Miami to honor the victims of the Oct. 7 attack.
The immersive experience recreates the horror of the attack on the Nova Music Festival.
First, it features joy and dance.
Then, the moment the music stopped, the rockets in the air — the first signs of what no one could imagine.
It’s called the Nova Exhibition, but more than that, it’s an immersion: smelling incense in the campground-turned-killing-fields.
The exhibit shows videos of the attacks taken from the victims and the attackers themselves. One portion of the exhibit shows the same bullet-riddled portable toilets from the festival.
Everything was hand-collected from the Nova grounds.
It also features intimate belongings of the shot and the burned.
One guest spotted a boot from a son he lost at Nova.
“I picked it up, recognized it, and said that’s my son’s boot,” he said.
The exhibit is meant to make people consider the ruins of baseless hate.
Nova is an assault on the senses that connects and unites all people: Music and love and also tragedy and pain.
“I was going to dance,” Hila Fakliro said.
Fakliro was a bartender at Nova at a bar, one of 40 there, half of whom did not survive.
“If you know what’s happened and you still don’t like us, I’m OK with that,” she said. “But if you don’t like me and you hate me without knowing the facts, why?”
The big question of Nova: why?
The exhibition ends with a bit of hope and a bit of healing and it ends with an exit that the people there did not have that morning.
Admission is free, but with a donation that goes to an organization that supports survivors and their families.
North Miami is the third city for this traveling exhibit. It’s located at Greenwich Studios at 12100 NE 16th Ave.