The Nova Exhibition aims to return the world to October 7 — and keep us there
The Nova Exhibition in Washington, D.C., 14 June 2025
Em Hilton writes in +972 on 4 August 2026:
I have a standout memory from March of the Living, the educational program that brings thousands of young Jews to Poland each year to learn about the Holocaust, which I attended as a 16-year-old in 2008. At the museum on the site of the Belzec extermination camp, we were made to walk down a ramp into the “Contemplation Room,” a structure modeled on the camp’s gas chamber which was blown up by the Nazis as the Allies closed in.
Once inside, packed into that dark, windowless room, the rabbi accompanying us broke the silence: “Kol od balevav penimah…” That memory — of a rabbi leading a rendition of Israel’s national anthem at the site where the Nazis murdered almost 500,000 Jews — returned to me during a recent visit to the Nova Exhibition. According to its website, the traveling installation aims to place visitors “on a timeline” of the Nova music festival, the site of Hamas’ largest massacre on October 7, through a “carefully crafted mosaic of information, evidence, and emotion.”
The exhibition opened in London in May, after traveling across North America and Europe over the past two years. Funded through the Israeli nonprofit The Tribe of Nova Foundation and prominent donors including music executive Scooter Braun, its charitable sponsor for the London leg of the tour was the Jewish National Fund UK. Its London advisory board included representatives of the Community Security Trust, former Labour MP Lord Austin of Dudley, and Lord Stuart Polak, honorary president of Conservative Friends of Israel.
Yet while the exhibition — which claims to have received over 600,000 visitors so far — prompted significant protest and pushback in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, in Britain it was largely treated as apolitical. Its arrival was met with a flurry of tepidly sympathetic reviews in liberal publications and visits from politicians across the political spectrum, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The British Jewish communal establishment — from synagogues to the ostensibly progressive New Israel Fund — has enthusiastically supported the initiative and organized visits for their congregants and communities.