Nova exhibition for Jewish News May 2026
The first thing that hits you when you enter the Nova Festival exhibition in London is a sound-scape of anguished cries, as the people targeted by Hamas terrorists run for their lives.
You don’t need to speak Hebrew to get a sense of what was happening. You are pitched from a film of warm and fuzzy, peace and love, trance music, early on the morning of 7 October 2023, as the golden sun rises, when suddenly the music stops and the organisers tell the disbelieving crowd:”Red Alert!”
And pandemonium ensues. All around the exhibit are screens, some of which feature testimony from the survivors, which you watch in shocked disbelief, as you walk on sanded floors, circling around shot-up cars rescued from the Nova Festival site. Three hundred and seventy eight people were murdered at Nova and many more wounded.
There are cubicles which represent the concrete shelters on Route 232 away from the festival site by Kibbutz Re’em, into which dozens of festival-goers crammed themselves in a desperate attempt to escape the terrorists. In one of these, Aner Shapira, a British-Israeli soldier aged just 22, tried to stave off the Hamas attackers by throwing out the grenades they were lobbing into the shelter. A wall poster tells us: “There were 40 of us in there and only seven came out alive. We couldn’t move. We were all covered by corpses.”
It is truly heartbreaking to read comments from survivors, such as this from Adir Ben Zikri: “I realised that they were shooting at every vehicle that approached and then they burned it. I ran between burnt bodies, body parts strewn all over the road and rivers of blood. We reached a rescue point. The guy next to me was mumbling: ‘They shot at us in the car. They turned my brother into a sieve, they left nothing of him. I have nothing to bury… nothing to bury…”
Another annexe room holds a screen with an interview with one of the Zaka volunteers, Shneor Gol, who speaks of the unspeakable, of the mutilated bodies and bags of heads, He smiles and says that Zaka volunteers are “thought of as the tough guys, the people who didn’t cry. But I cry every day.”
He is not alone. It is almost impossible to view this exhibition without shedding tears, and indeed dozens of hardened journalists at the press preview were doing just that.
Forty-four of the Nova Festival participants were among the 251 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Among them was Elkana Bohbot, one of the organisers of the 2023 festival, whose two partners were killed by Hamas.
He was one of the last hostages to be released — in October 2025 — and has spent his time since in writing a book about his experience. The book, 738 Days in Hamas Captivity, is due out in English shortly.
Bohbot told Jewish News that though he found the recreation of the Nova massacre “very painful”, he felt it was his “mission” to talk about what happened. Though the exhibition has travelled to six sites in America, to Buenos Aires, Toronto and Berlin, this was his first time to see it — “as I was in Gaza”, he says, gently.
He has one message for the non-Jewish world: “Please come to see it. Even if you only come for a minute.” Deeply aware of the comparisons with the Holocaust, he told JN: “Now the survivors are dying and it’s too easy to deny what happened. But we, the survivors of 7 October, we are here and we must tell the story.”
The comparison with Auschwitz is underlined in one area of the exhibition, as hundreds of pairs of shoes, abandoned by fleeing festival-goers or those murdered, are on display against a background of memorial candles.
Moshe and Shira Shapira, parents of Aner, came to London to bear witness on their son’s behalf. Moshe described him as “very creative, an artist, but above all someone with high moral values. “He was like that since a small child and no-one who knew him was surprised at what happened.” The couple said that his legacy to them was “trying to learn from Aner”.
And fresh off the plane from California was Taryn Thomas, a Stanford University student, who radically changed her mind about the Palestinian issue after visiting the Nova Festival exhibition in Los Angeles in October 2024.
She didn’t know any Jewish students at Stanford — “I only learned about Jews from pro-Palestinian people” — but had begun to wonder about pro-Palestinian actions at the university after a demonstration caused $700,000 worth of damage to the campus. “I didn’t understand how this kind of graffiti could free Palestine”, she told JN.
So she was already questioning the received wisdom, when she received an email inviting non-Jewish students to visit the Nova exhibition. She says now that she decided to go “mainly to look for Zionist propaganda. But then I saw how horrific it was. It broke my mind”. The item which had the most effect on her was the triumphant phone call from a Hamas terrorist to his father boasting of having killed 10 Jews. “And the father, instead of condemning him, actually rejoiced.” She shakes her head. “Ignorance can be excused, arrogance can’t.”
She has been to Israel twice since then, marvelling at the “diversity of the society”. What she has taken from the exhibition was “seeing kids my age, dancing… and then fleeing for their lives”.
There is a spirit of defiance about this exhibition. As well as the now well-known line, “We Will Dance Again”, there is a panel highlighting the March 2026 UN report on the sexual violence and rape carried out by Hamas terrorists. “We will not be silent” is the headline. Everyone should see this exhibition and not remain silent, but tell the Nova story again and again.
The Nova Festival exhibition runs in London from May 20 to July 5