At Adama Tova, grief hangs thick in the air. The sun seems to linger as it sets over the horizon, shining warm golden light on a yurt where siblings of Nova festival survivors are finishing up an art therapy session. Others mill about the garden, sitting on bean bags and sofas, and snacking on cakes and fruit in the communal kitchen. People move slowly here. Even the crickets sound mournful.

“Anyone you see here over the age of 50 probably lost a son or daughter at Nova,” Einat Haimovitz tells me. She is a psychotherapist and the founder of Adama Tova — “Good Earth” in Hebrew — located in a quiet garden in Sitria, a moshav in central Israel. The garden belongs to her father, although Einat’s small bungalow backs onto it too.

On Oct. 9 of last year, two days after thousands of Hamas-led militants breached the Gaza fence into southern Israel and attacked attendees of the trance festival, Haimovitz, her father, and her partner got to work. They knew the state wouldn’t provide adequate support for survivors and the families of those murdered, so they would need to do it themselves. 

They sourced sofas and armchairs, tables, rugs, and cushions. They set up a network of volunteers and found people who were willing to share their services with the community. From Sunday to Thursday, the community has access to group therapy, art therapy, massage, sound baths, meditation sessions, and healing circles. Every now and again, a musician comes to play a free show on a makeshift stage. 

Haimovitz says her mission is to create a space where people can grieve and heal together, without having to pretend they’re okay. She understands this will not be a normal healing process, because the circumstances are anything but normal. One year on, the community is still paralyzed with grief. 

Haimovitz is slight with a shaggy haircut and blue eyes that brim with compassion. Several people I meet here describe the extraordinary impact she’s had on them, including the mother of a 29-year-old man who was murdered at the festival. “Grateful doesn’t cover it,” she says. “She saved our lives.”

The mother’s eyes swim with something other than tears, and her voice can’t quite find its balance. “It’s his birthday today,” she says. “We need to leave soon because his friends are throwing him a party.”

Dudi, a bereaved father in his mid 50s, sits on a bench in the dusky half-light playing the hand pan. He tells me the sound makes him smile because it was his son’s favorite instrument. He started playing it after his son was shot in the head by Hamas militants while hiding in a car with his wounded friends. “I wish he had just run away,” Dudi says, with tears in his eyes. “But he couldn’t leave his friends.”

Nova Festival was at the epicenter of the devastating Hamas-led October 7 assault. Located near Kibbutz Re’im, less than a 10-minute drive from the Gaza fence, the festival was in full flow at around 6:30 a.m. when the first rockets were spotted in the sky. Panic ensued, and within minutes the festival was under attack by militants who arrived from Gaza on trucks, motorbikes, and paragliders. They surrounded the site, blocking all exits, and began firing indiscriminately.

In all, 364 Nova attendees were slaughtered that day. A further 40 were kidnapped and taken into captivity in Gaza. Several eyewitnesses have testified to crimes of rape and sexual violence committed by the attackers. Israel’s security establishment has speculated that Hamas had no prior knowledge that the festival was taking place, and decided to target it spontaneously upon finding a large gathering of Israelis so close to the Strip.

While fierce international debate still surrounds aspects of these events, what is clear is that Nova was the site of the largest massacre of October 7, accounting for nearly half of the civilian casualties that day. It was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in the state’s history.

‘My body was waiting for the bullet to come’

Over the past year, initiatives like Adama Tova have sprung up all over the country, offering support, infrastructure, community, and even legal advice to survivors and the families of those killed. Another one is Tribe of Nova, which is funded entirely by private donors and holds regular events to rehabilitate survivors back into society, giving them a sense of community and a reason to leave the house. If someone hasn’t showed up for a while, the team will call them to check how they’re doing.

One warm evening in late September, at a Tribe of Nova event in Tel Aviv, I meet 39-year-old Carmel Efron and her 7-year-old daughter. At around 6:30 a.m. on October 7, Efron was finishing her shift stamping entrance tickets at Nova when rockets started flying overhead. She wasn’t initially worried and tried to calm people down — but soon realized something serious was happening and decided to get in her car to leave.

“I’m sitting in a traffic jam and I see five guys with guns,” Efron says. At first, she thought they were armed police, but then one of them approached the car in front of her and shot the woman driving. That’s when everybody, including Efron, got out of their cars and started running.

Efron had no idea of the scale of the attack. She assumed the shooters were part of Hamas but that there wouldn’t be more, so she stayed near the festival site until a security guard told her to run for her life. 

“We start running through the field and there are bullets flying everywhere,” she recounts. “We’re three people, and I was barefoot. At one point we had to stop running and crawl so they wouldn’t see us, and my friend looks back and says there are five terrorists in the car trying to shoot us. My body was waiting for the bullet to come.”

Just at that moment, a car pulled up in front of Efron and the driver urged her in Hebrew to get inside. She piled in with her friends, and they sped off toward another group. “The people ran to the car, so we packed them in, we put people in the trunk,” she says. “I think we were about 20 people.”

The driver sped toward Kibbutz Be’eri, a place they assumed would be safe. “My friend is on the phone to his father, and his father says do not go to Be’eri. It’s under attack.” 

The driver turned around and took them to a bomb shelter in the middle of a field and then told them to get out because he’s going back to save more people. “I asked him if he’s crazy — how could he go back there? He said he’d rather die than go home knowing he’d left his friends there.”

The phone call that never came

Benny, 21, sits alone at the Tribe of Nova event. He’s covered in a variety of fresh-looking tattoos of the Nova logo, and he speaks quietly, curled up into himself, without making eye contact. It’s been one year, and he is still shell-like and shaken. “I recently moved to Jerusalem to study the Torah,” he says. “After Nova, I had to turn to God to make sense of it.”

Not all of the festival survivors turned to God; in fact, 42 of them turned to an attorney called Gilad Ginzburg. He is helping them sue the Israeli army, the police, the Defence Ministry, and the Shin Bet for gross negligence, in light of the warnings they received — and failed to act on — about unusual activity near the Gaza fence on the night of Oct. 6.

Three licensed open-air festivals were taking place in the Gaza border area that weekend: Nova, Mushroom Project, whose attendees survived, and Psyduck, where 16 party-goers were killed. All three had the correct permits to throw their events, despite the operations officer of the army’s Gaza Division having voiced concern about the threat of rocket fire from Gaza.

As Efron’s story highlights, the lack of information that morning was deadly. When the attackers arrived, many Nova attendees fled toward the nearby kibbutzim that also came under assault, only to be killed there. But it should never have come to that.

“During the night between Oct. 6-7, at least two situational assessments were carried out in the IDF due to an unusual occurrence at the border of the Gaza Strip, one around midnight and another around 3 a.m., a few hours before the Hamas attack,” Ginzburg writes in the lawsuit. “The head of the Shin Bet even arrived at the organization’s headquarters in Tel Aviv during the night and held consultations through the night.”

By that point, there were already indications that Hamas was preparing to breach the fence and try to kidnap Israelis. “It is therefore impossible to understand how the defendants did not order the party to be dispersed immediately,” the lawsuit continues. “One phone call by IDF officials to the commander in charge of the party to disperse the party immediately in view of the expected risk would have saved the lives and prevented the bodily and mental injuries of hundreds of party participants.”

‘It’s impossible to heal, because it’s never-ending’

In addition to the failure to call off the festival after identifying suspicious activity, Nova survivors are suing the government for allowing the event to take place in the vicinity of Gaza when many soldiers in the area were at home for the Simchat Torah holiday. They accuse their leaders of a security failure — but for survivors and most Israelis, the very idea of holding a festival on the doorstep of the besieged Strip is not seen as controversial.

Lev Kreitman was a few miles away from the site of the Nova festival on October 7. He was meeting with co-organizers of Midburn, Israel’s Burning Man offshoot, which was due to take place in the area in November. “For an event like Midburn, we need a lot of land,” he explains. “We create a small city, and in a tiny country like Israel finding a spot that is remote enough is a challenge.”

Kreitman says their best bet is in southern Israel, even though most of the open land is either a military zone or a nature reserve. “You have very few options if you want to create a big cultural event,” he says. Festivals like Midburn or Nova don’t have a fixed location; some years they might get noise complaints which forces them to move, which is how many events end up so close to the Gaza fence.

“There are about 12 different entities that you need to get approval from before you can hold an event, including military, police, fire, and rescue services,” he says. “Any event near a border, whether it’s Gaza, Jordan, or Egypt, needs government approval. You work months in advance with the authorities, they each give their conditions, and you have to meet them for the event to go ahead.”

Kreitman says the military didn’t give any particular warnings when he was applying for permits. “They don’t tell you anything specific, just that they will approve the event on the day it opens if all the different factors are met,” he explains. “Midburn was supposed to take place a couple of miles further away from Nova, but when you’re thinking about a threat you’re thinking about rockets, not thousands of murderous zombies running through the fence killing and raping people.”

Kreitman’s sentiment is one that’s shared throughout Israel. Hamas wasn’t seen as a real threat, and its presence a few miles away didn’t register as cause for concern. Gaza was locked up in the Israeli psyche just as its population is caged inside the Strip. 

One year on, and despite access to psychologists, community, rehabilitation, and support, it’s clear the Nova survivors and the families of those murdered will never fully recover. “There’s no end to our trauma,” Efron says, “because people are still dying, and people are still being held hostage. There are still missiles, we’re scared, there’s a war in the north, the news is bad. So it’s impossible to heal, because it’s never-ending.”