It was announced earlier this month that the Nova Music Festival exhibit in Lower Manhattan would be extended until June 22. This occurred in light of, or perhaps because of, unprecedented anti-Semitic incidents nationwide, including nasty demonstrations just outside it at 35 Wall Street. The exhibit, which memorialized the lives senselessly killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, came to New York City on April 21, and just days ahead of its closing, “more than 100,000 visitors have walked through the Lower Manhattan space during its two-month run, according to organizers – with a notable uptick over the past week,” as reported by JTA.
The Nova Music Festival exhibit featured dozens of video testimonies from survivors and first responders, as well as camping equipment and clothing strewn around, in addition to burned and bullet-ridden vehicles found at the campgrounds. The presentation initially ran for ten weeks in Tel Aviv at the start of the year, with no intention of being such a somber worldwide attraction months later.
Ofir Amir, one of the exhibit’s founders, a producer at the music festival, and who survived the massacre despite being shot in both legs, gave a poignant and harrowing minute-by-minute re-telling of what happened on October 7 in a CNN interview with Bianna Golodryga.
“6:29 a.m. is when the rockets started,” recalled Amir. “I remember at the first moment, as we were looking at the sky and there were hundreds of rockets, the first feeling was, ‘We don’t want to believe it.’ Around 8:00 a.m. was when we realized this was real. We saw [Hamas terrorists] come with pickup trucks and heavy machine guns. They started shooting at the crowd. I was shot at around 10 o’clock in the morning. After I got shot, we managed to escape from the terrorists three times.”
In describing the genesis of the Nova Music Festival exhibit, Amir detailed how he and his co-producers “re-created the main stage of the festival in Tel Aviv. Once we opened the doors, we understood that it wasn’t just a memorial. We have such a strong tool in our hands to show the world what happened.”
The Queens Jewish Link spoke exclusively with Dr. Juliana Brown, an Israeli who translated into English over 380 short biographies of the murdered victims memorialized at the Nova Music Festival Exhibition.
“I had no idea it would be such a massive exhibit, and when I saw pictures of the site in New York, I was stunned [as I] never spoke to anyone from the Tribe who organized it,” says Brown. “I responded to a post on a work group looking for a translator for an exhibit. I found this [job] through a project manager, and it’s a huge honor to have helped bring it to the world because, outside of Israel, they can’t comprehend what they did to us. Once we started, it was full of crazy hours with list after list of biographies, articles, and explanatory texts.
“It was an insane month of working round-the-clock [doing the translation] on this all-consuming horror, and then...silence. It’s like working at Yad Vashem. No one would think to put their name on the exhibits. This is the most important work I’ve ever done,” she adds.
Dr. Brown, who was born in Canada (living in Ottawa and then Toronto), lives near Caesarea in Pardes Hana-Karkur with her husband, Doron, and five children. Making aliyah in 1989, she moved back to Canada in 1994; and after spending long periods in Argentina, she returned to Israel in 2011. Earning her PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Carleton University, Brown has over 20 years of experience in translation.
“On the morning of October 7, I was on my way to shul. When I got there, my husband saw me and told me to come outside,” recalls Brown. “Before that, on the way, I saw our rabbi running across the road to the moetzah – town council – building with his tallis on. I couldn’t figure out why it was open on the chag. Shabbat [on the morning of October 7] was insane. Chiloni [secular, non-religious] neighbors came running over to the shul to update us constantly. My eldest daughter, who is 21, had been at Kibbutz Amir, up the road from Kiryat Shmona. She was freaking out because there were rumors all over. She couldn’t get hold of us.”
In addition to her immediate family, Brown credits her network of colleagues, “my ladies,” as she calls them, as her “rock” during the nearly nine months since the terror assault. “Most of them have kids in the army, too. I’m shattered [by having to write nearly] 400 mini-biographies of the murdered,” says Brown. “They are explanations of the morning when all hell broke loose in a place that had been a musical paradise only minutes before. [I’ve transcribed] narratives of heroism and real-life barbarians who stormed the literal gates.”
The Nova Music Festival’s exhibit’s producers stated that their main goals were to focus on the senseless terrorism committed on October 7 and to prompt attendees how a concert devoted to peace and love became the grounds for unmitigated slaughter.
“[My involvement with the Nova Music Festival exhibit] is deep inside me now,” concludes Brown. “I’m waiting to go to the south [of Israel] to the campground site and get some closure. I will cry because I have [over] eight months’ worth of tears. I want to just be there, and I know I’ll be able to feel all the neshamot (souls), their pain, their fear, and the incredible love they tried to show when they tried to save others. I’ll just be there with them.”
By Jared Feldschreiber
