Scooter Braun, Mayor Eric Adams appear at Nova Music Festival exhibit opening in NYC

An exhibit honoring the victims and survivors of the Nova Music Festival called “6:29 AM The Moment Music Stood Still,” opened in New York City last week, displaying bullet ridden bathroom stalls, burned cars, and harrowing testimonials from those on the ground October 7.

Hamas terrorists killed 370 people at the concert dedicated to peace and love and kidnapped 44. (In total, 1,200 were killed in Israel that day and some 240 people were taken hostage.)

Scooter Braun, who helped bring the exhibit that first showed in Tel Aviv to the United States, gave a speech at an opening party where Mayor Eric Adams also spoke.

Braun’s hope is to “educate” people, saying, “This is not a political issue. It’s not an issue of race or religion, it’s a music festival. This is Coachella, this is Stagecoach, this is Governors Ball. This is any festival you, your kids or you, or your brother or sister have attended.”

He asked that “People to see themselves in this moment.” 

Survivors from the massacre have also been on hand.

“It was my first trance festival ever,” survivor Tomer Meir, 21, told Page Six. “At 6:29 AM the music stops. From a moment of everybody dancing and laughing, it turned into a horror movie. A lot of rockets, terrorists coming after us who wanted to kill everybody.”

Tomer told us he was near a road where his car was parked, but that his vehicle was hit by a rocket and they had to flee.

“We were hiding in a tunnel,” behind the road, he explained. “After we left the tunnel and returned to the road we met a lot of cops who didn’t know what to do, and in that moment a lot of cars came with AK47’s and started shooting everyone.”

A clearly emotional Tomer told us, “I ran away,” until they found a ride.

He was lucky. “We came as 14 friends, we returned as 14 friends,” he said.

He is now trying to recover from the traumatic experience.

“I am healing myself, it’s a big journey,” he told us, saying he is relying on other survivors of the tragedy. “The Nova community is the best thing that could happen. Our healing is healing each other in the community. This is the biggest thing I have right now.”

(Some 50 attendees who made it out of the festival alive have committed suicide, Nova festival survivor Guy Ben Shimon told a parliamentary hearing for a State Audit Commission on the treatment of the Oct. 7 survivors recently.)

The exhibit allows viewers to see the discarded tents and items left in the chaos, as well as hear a heartbreaking last phone call that Romi Gonen, who is still being held hostage in Gaza, made to her mother.  

One room contains information on sexual assaults that happened at the festival by Hamas. As part of the display, a member of ZAKA, a voluntary community emergency response team, tears up and describes the sexual mutilation he saw.

The exhibit is created and directed by Nova’s founders and Reut Feingold, along with US partners including Braun, Joe Teplow and Josh Kadden.

Yoni Feingold, who helped initiate the exhibit, says that what happened is not only about Israel.

“There were guests from all over the world, over 300 people from different countries,” he said. “There were DJs from India, DJs from Brazil, from Europe, from America. It is important for us to separate it from the Israeli idea, and let the world know this was an international music festival that was attacked by vicious people. It can happen anywhere.”