Thousands gathered on Monday morning at the Nova music festival site to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Hamas October 7 attack. Journalists from all over the world gathered at the Nova Music Festival memorial located in Re’im in southern Israel, as well as family members of the victims, who came to pay their respects to their loved ones. Many Nova survivors shared their stories of survival with the press and foreign media outlets, while others suffered in silence and decided to stay by their loved one’s memorial for most of the ceremony.
President Isaac Herzog attended the ceremony from start to finish and expressed his deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones during this violent attack on Israeli soil.
In attendance was also Israeli activist Noa Tishby. Asked about the experience of talking to the families at the site where they lost their loved ones, Tishby told The Jerusalem Post, “It feels very emotional and very right. I feel like this is the place for me to be first of all in terms of just being in Israel on the anniversary year of October 7.
“Just being here at the site of Nova – because there’s nowhere else in the country where, on October 7, the kind of juxtaposition between good and evil is so apparent,” she said. “Those kids were so much about love and peace and life and they were met with the greatest of darkness. One side of them was celebrating life and the other one was celebrating death so it’s very important for me to be here and to show support for the family of the murdered.”
Tishby, who has been a prominent Israeli celebrity on social media as well as at public forums worldwide since October 7, told the Post there was a simple message to take away from being at the Nova site and speaking with families.
'We aren't going anywhere'
“We’re not going anywhere,” she stated. “That’s the bottom line. We’re here to stay, we’re here to stay – Am Israel Chai!”
FOR SOME of the survivors, this was their first time back at the site since that fateful day. Kfir Baruch Hod, 24, attended the festival by simply accepting his friend’s ticket and taking this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have fun. He explained to the Post that he never could have imagined what that night would turn into.
He spoke as he was surrounded by the images and names of his four friends who were murdered at the festival: Shaked Habani, Gili Adar, Raz Bokovza, and Avraham Tyberg. He said he continuously wrestles with why he was presented with such amazing people in his life and then they were taken away – friends who described as people of “pure love.”
Kfir’s message to the world is that he has danced again, but that it is an uphill battle as antisemitism and pure hate still exist on our Earth. His grandmother was in the Holocaust and survived and his father served in the Yom Kippur War and also survived, he said, adding that he comes from a long line of fighters and he will never stop fighting for what is right and just in the world.
Former spokesmen of the Israeli government were also in attendance at Re’im. Elyon Levy told of the difficult mix of emotions being there with the families.
“On the one hand, I expected to feel overwhelmed and in some ways quite numb,” he explained. “It’s the same names, same faces we’ve been seeing for a year; we’ve been telling the story since the atrocities, and I seldom understand how the world is forgetting what we can never forget.
“It’s so important on the first anniversary of October 7, as people around the world are celebrating, justifying, and glorifying what happened to remind themselves what happened on October 7,” he said. “We must keep fighting for the memory of the victims,” and it is “just as important to keep fighting to free all the hostages from the Hamas rapist regime.”
Through this massive tragedy, the commemoration event brought people together today for a moment of reflection and to try to ease the pain that many Israelis and Jews worldwide have been feeling this entire year since the start of the war.