26-05-2025
Eurovision Star Survived Israel's Top Tourist Site, The Nova Festival
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael representing Israel with the song "New Day Will Rise" performs during ... More the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Basel on May 15, 2025. Raphael is a survivor of the Nova Festival massacre on October 7, 2023. (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
Israel has dozens of important tourist attractions. They range from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites in Jerusalem to the beach at Eilat, the restaurants and shorefront of Tel Aviv to floating on the Dead Sea or visiting the mystical sites of Safed. Pilgrims can visit the River Jordan or the room where the Last Supper is said to have taken place.
But the most visited tourist destination is none of these places.
The Nova Festival site, where more than 360 mostly young people were murdered at a music festival on October 7, 2023, is the most visited destination in Israel right now. Most visitors are Israeli, but an increasing number of international travelers are coming as well.
The KKL – JNF (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael - Jewish National Fund)Israeli National Parks office, operates the park in southern Israel where the festival took place. Dr. Michael Sprintsin, KKL-JNF's Forest Engineer of the Western Negev, told me the Nova Festival site gets between 4000 and 7000 visitors per day.
A survivor of the festival, Yuval Raphael, represented Israel in the popular Eurovision Song contest in May 2023. She ended up finishing second with her powerful performance of a 'New Day Will Rise.' Raphael, 24, survived the Nova Festival by hiding under the dead bodies of friends, in a shelter attacked by gunmen.
Memorials made by family and friends to individuals who lost their lives at the Nova Music Festival ... More in Israel on October 7, 2023. The National Park where the festival took place has become the most visited tourist site in Israel.
Raphael will be one of the featured performers in a benefit concert in Tel Aviv on June 26. The show will benefit the Nova Tribe Community Association, which helps commemorate the victims, support bereaved families, and aid survivors.
The Nova Festival was an electronic music and dance outdoor party held in an Israeli national park a few miles from the Gaza Strip. On October 7, 2023, the party was overrun by terrorists who brutally killed 364 partygoers and abducted another 40 to Gaza. Both of these numbers made up a significant portion of the 1200 people killed and 251 kidnapped on October 7. Tragically, several of the more than 50 hostages still being held in Gaza, alive and dead, were attendees or working at the Nova Festival.
The site is an hour and a half south of Tel Aviv, along roads also attacked on October 7. At the Nova site, there are newly paved roads, benches and toilets, but no food or gift shops.
To reach the Nova site, located at the Re'im Car Parking Lot near Kibbutz Re'im and the Re'im Forest, visitors can join one of the organized tour groups available online. Prices range from approximately $140 for a group tour to around $800 for a private tour. Alternatively, it is possible to rent a car. There is no ticketing or admission charge.
We visited on April 30, Israel's Memorial Day, which honors its dead and the victims of terrorism. Every year, everything stops at 1100 when sirens blare all over the country. When the siren blew, we got out of our car and stood at attention. We happened to be at a concrete bus shelter where two people were murdered on October 7.
A guitarist plays and sings a song by Yehuda Becher, a concert-goer at the Nova Music Festival in ... More Israel, who lost his life on October 7, 2023.
At the site, grieving friends and families have set up impromptu memorials, with brief portraits of the dead written in both Hebrew and English. There are signs with photos, written memories and favorite possessions. Posters on signposts show so many young faces, seemingly so alive. There are some larger group memorials as well. I watched a guitarist play a song written by one of the dead, as a small crowd listened.
With this tragic background, why is Nova a tourist site full of cars and buses in its dusty parking lot?
It is a folk memorial, different than Israel's other monuments to its dead, like the black monument to those from Jerusalem killed in the war that began October 7, or the desert fortress of Masada where a handful of Jews held off a Roman legion until their deaths. Rusting armored vehicles in the Golan Heights memorialize the greatest tank battle since World War II, where at great cost a hundred Israeli tanks held off 800 attacking Syrian vehicles in 1973.
Instead, family and friends have made the Nova site a shrine to beautiful young people who just wanted to dance. There is a stark empty stage where the performers played. There are scores of signs with pictures of smiling young men and women, with tattoos, with dogs, with birds, long hair and short, in bathing suits, in army uniforms, holding guitars. You feel you know them or people just like them.
As an international visitor, I did not know any of the victims. But the colorful people smiling confidently at me from the signs and the posters could have been my children. For many other visitors, they could have been their brothers and sisters, their cousins or friends. Later, we talked to a waitress at a beautiful restaurant near the Dizengoff fountain in Tel Aviv. She told us she lost eight friends at Nova.
Nova
Millions of people have visited Europe's concentration camps like Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald. But few Holocaust survivors remain to describe what happened.
At Nova, the survivors are young people still in their twenties, perhaps with a lifetime of trauma ahead of them. Already, more than 50 concertgoers are believed to have committed suicide.
At the site, I listened to a woman speaking in English to a group of foreign visitors. It quickly became clear she was talking about her own experience at the Nova Festival, when she and others hid in a trailer, listening to the shooting and the screams. Her husband was shot but survived.
The site has some grim reminders. A steel dumpster, with a glass floor containing some garbage from October 7, was where a dozen people hid, only to be discovered and murdered. Signs commemorate a group of young people who sought shelter in a disabled ambulance, only to be killed by a terrorist anti-tank missile.
A number of survivors of the Nova Music Festival are telling their stories now. Rita Yadid endured the horrific event alongside her husband and sister. As part of her healing journey, she speaks to groups and shares her story of survival, partly made possible by the bravery of her husband, Guy, who took bullets meant for her.
The concert stage at the Nova Festival site in southern Israel. On October 7, 2023, the concert was ... More the site of a terrorist attack that killed over 360 people.
Rita has since become a leading voice in the struggle for recognition and support for survivors. Visitors to Israel can set up a discussion or tour of Nova sites with Rita here.
A number of films such as 'We Will Dance Again' have been made about the Festival and its survivors. The Nova Festival exhibit, a traveling show that shows the tents, the sleeping bags, the phones and the burnt cars of the murdered, has played in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and currently in Toronto.
But nothing has the same impact as wandering among the memorials for these smiling, confident young people, who seem so alive. The site, with its blowing wind and trees growing in the desert, is beautiful and terrible. The beauty, and the rawness, is compelling.
Eden Yerushalmi, 24, was working as a bartender when she was kidnapped from the Nova Festival on ... More October 7, 2023. She was murdered in a tunnel along with 5 other hostages on August 28 or 29th, 2024 after 11 months of captivity.
