Nova 7 October Exhibition Opens in London as 10th City
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- Nova exhibition opened in Shoreditch, east London, under heavy security (two police vans, suited guards, undisclosed venue until morning) as the 10th city to host the immersive commemoration of the 7 October attacks.
- Elkana Bohbot, co-organizer of the 2023 Nova music festival who spent 738 days as a Hamas hostage (690 in a tunnel), challenged would-be protesters — referencing the hundreds who demonstrated at the New York showing calling the show propaganda — to "come in for one minute" to confront the victims' phone and attackers' body-camera footage.
- Aner Shapiro, 22, a British-Israeli off-duty soldier who had come to the festival to dance, is documented via nearby CCTV throwing grenades back out of an 8-person bomb shelter holding 27 people, telling those behind him, "Don't be afraid. You will be OK. I will protect you," before being killed by a rocket-propelled grenade; five of the 16 remaining were taken hostage, one was shot on the spot, and three later returned alive from Gaza.
- Jake Marlowe, 26, an unarmed security guard at the festival, last called his parents in north London at 4:30am UK time on 7 October, saying "I love you" and noting "paragliders in the air," then never called back; his father Michael, 64, identified him in an Israeli morgue and said of the exhibition: "We are not lying."
- The exhibition's opening room shows a three-minute film of partygoers describing the sunrise and bliss of the festival, cutting to the moment the DJ is told to stop the music with a "red alert" announcement — a sequence the organizers say uses "technicolour" first-person footage to challenge those who deny the attack's gravity.
- The display of recovered belongings — including shoes of the 378 killed, burned-out cars, and shot-through toilet cubicles arranged alongside the pro-cam footage that captured them — echoes the spectacles, hair, and footwear displayed at Holocaust concentration camps, per the article.
- Aner's father Moshe (55) said the New York protest was "a manifestation of how important it is to do this exhibition over and over and in more and more places," framing continued demonstrations as proof of the show's necessity rather than a reason to cancel future stops.
Why it matters: The exhibition's London stop — the 10th city — is built entirely around unedited footage from victims' phones and Hamas attackers' body cameras, a deliberate choice by organizers to pre-empt denial; the presence of police vans and undisclosed venue signals that UK authorities expect protests like the one that drew hundreds in New York, giving bereaved families like the Shapiro and Marlowes a high-security public platform to insist on the documented scale of the attack.
