The aftermath of the Israeli music festival attacked on Oct. 7 to be recreated at the Weitzman museum

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Artifacts left behind by festival goers on the grounds of the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, after the devastating attack by Hamas fighters that killed 364 attendees, arrive in Philadelphia Sunday at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.

After the massacre, the producers of the electronic trance music festival gathered and saved everything remaining on the grounds, including toppled tents, crumpled beach chairs, abandoned backpacks and bottles, DJ equipment, bullet-ridden portable bathrooms and cars destroyed by fire.

That detritus was reimagined as the traveling exhibition “The Moment Music Stood Still,” which arranges the material as tableaus that recreate the aftermath of the brutal attack. The exhibition features a banner reading “We Will Dance Again.”

“Imagine what the grounds looked like the next day and amplify that by a massacre where people were killed, fled, ran for hours,” said the Weitzman’s chief public engagement officer, Emily August. “The detritus of that festival is a memorial to what happened.”

“The Moment Music Stood Still” debuted in Tel Aviv, then traveled to New York last spring, and is now on view in Los Angeles. “The Nova Exhibition will be a shock to your system and a restart to your soul,” read a review of the L.A. show in Forbes magazine.

The reduced pop-up exhibition at the Weitzman arrives for the one-year anniversary Oct. 7 at the insistence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who experienced the show in Los Angeles.

The date also corresponds with the annual Democratic Governors Association Fall Policy Conference, which will be held in Philadelphia. Shapiro is expected to attend.

“Moment” will be on view for one week only, from Oct. 6 to Oct. 13, in the Weitzman’s fifth floor ballroom. It is free to the public. Two original cars charred during the attack will be set up on the sidewalk outside the museum.

“While this history is still unfolding, it’s clear American Jewish lives were changed that day,” said Weitzman CEO Misha Galperin in a statement. “As a place of truth and learning, we must share these stories.”

Even before the items became a traveling exhibition, the material was already being used informally for memorials: the portable bathrooms are adorned with stickers remembering individuals who died on that day.

Officials at the Weitzman said the exhibition does not address Israel’s response by attacking Gaza, rather only memorializes the events of October 7. When the exhibition was in New York City it attracted pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which resulted in one arrest.

The exhibition at the Weitzman museum include programming, such as a screening of the film “We Will Dance Again” compiled from cell phone footage shot by festival attendees and eye-witness interviews with survivors, on Sunday, Oct. 6; and an evening vigil commemoration for the anniversary of Oct. 7 and those still held hostage, also on Sunday.

The smaller pop-up at the Weitzman runs concurrently with the full-size exhibition in Los Angeles without borrowing any of the latter’s objects. The Nova music festival producers have a warehouse full of surplus artifacts that can populate multiple exhibitions at once.

After a previous antisemitic act of violence – an attack at Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas in 2022 – the Weitzman acquired a coffee cup and folding chair that played key parts in that incident. August could not say if the Weitzman plans to acquire any object from the Nova festival for its permanent collection.

“I would have a hard time imagining a future core exhibition for this museum that didn’t include the events of Oct. 7 because of how acutely and irrevocably Jewish lives were changed that day,” she said. “Even though this is still very fresh history and the American Jewish and global Jewish communities are still processing the events of Oct. 7, bringing it here is a way to start telling that story and to help with the healing.”