A backgammon set suspended midgame. Tents and folding picnic chairs dotted among the many bushes. A psychedelic dance ground with downtempo and chillout trance enjoying within the background as video screens present photos of flushed, ecstatic younger individuals shifting to a silent beat.
The objects, salvaged from the Oct. 7 “Tribe of Nova” trance festival at Re’im in southern Israel, are a part of a brand new set up in an enormous hangar at Tel Aviv’s exhibition grounds that recreates a number of the essence of an occasion that was devoted to peace and love however was shut down by barrages of rocket hearth from Gaza.
Within the horror that adopted, a whole bunch of Hamas gunmen surged throughout the border and surrounded the music pageant, ambushing individuals of their vehicles alongside the highway and looking them down as they fled throughout fields. A minimum of 360 festivalgoers have been slain that day, based on the Israeli authorities — almost a 3rd of the overall killed within the Hamas-led assault. Others have been taken to Gaza and are nonetheless being held hostage there.
The exhibit, which opened to the general public for 2 weeks on Dec. 7, is titled “Nova 6.29” — for the second, that morning round dawn, when the music stopped.
“It shows the idea behind the community of Nova and tells the story of 6:29, when light turned to darkness,” mentioned Yoni Feingold, an Israeli leisure mogul and an initiator of the challenge. “It is a vast memorial for the nearly 400 who were killed.”
The set up is among the first bodily memorials of the occasions of Oct. 7. Israelis are solely starting to consider the right way to commemorate the victims of that Saturday, the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year historical past.
Some persons are speaking about preserving, as a sort of museum, the charred ruins of neighborhoods in border communities that got here below assault. A number of organizations are gathering testimony from survivors.
The nation has not but held an official day of nationwide mourning, having gone straight to conflict in opposition to Hamas in Gaza.
In a single nook of the corridor, yellow transportable bathroom cubicles are lined up, the underside halves of a number of the doorways riddled with bullet holes. Close by, a jumble of incinerated vehicles.
On the opening of the exhibition, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, described it as “a hallowed space.”
“The fragments of the party and the torn pieces of life lie here now as a silent testimony, in memory of all the tremendous human beauty that was lost,” he mentioned, including, “The massacre, and the deep and painful wound it created, are the legacy of an entire generation.”
Proceeds from the exhibit, which is predicted to stay in Tel Aviv for a couple of weeks, will go to assist survivors and households of these killed.
“We are looking ahead,” mentioned Raz Malka, 27, a member of the Nova manufacturing staff who survived the assault. “The terrorists came to degrade and murder people who were there having the time of their lives,” he mentioned, including: “We will dance again” — the brand new motto of the Nova staff.
The pageant’s principal stage is now arrange within the exhibition corridor and etched with the names of the manufacturing employees who constructed it, stayed to dismantle it when the rocket hearth started and have been killed. A second stage close by — of the Mushroom Venture, which performed Goa trance, a mode that originated in India — was produced by twin brothers, Osher and Michael Vaknin, 35, from Jerusalem. They, too, have been killed.
Tables labeled “Lost and Found” are laden with belongings retrieved from the positioning: rows of footwear; eyeglasses and sun shades; luggage and pouches; toiletries; automobile and home keys.
Video of individuals dancing of their final moments is interspersed with screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges from that day, capturing the worry and terror as individuals tried to flee and conceal. One other rolling display shows portraits of those that by no means made it house.
Idit Shachal, who was visiting the exhibit on a latest weekday, mentioned she had “come to see and understand.” Her son, Nadav, 24, had survived the rave after fleeing for eight hours on foot with a good friend till they discovered refuge in a village almost 10 miles away.
“My heart aches,” Ms. Shachal mentioned, glancing on the burned vehicles. “The thought that all these things are from there.”
