Nova Festival Survivors Join for October 7 Film Screening in Bedford
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After finishing his army service, Tomer Wiener, a now 26-year-old from the City of Haifa in northern Israel, was at somewhat of a crossroads in life.
His mother wanted him to become an engineer, a field in which he had little interest. But after a trip to Latin America, he discovered psytrance festivals – dance festivals that celebrate psychedelic culture and music.
“I started going to these kinds of festivals, and I just fell in love,” Wiener explained. “Because it is the first time I went to a party without judging everybody else.”
“It’s not a matter of who you are. It’s a matter of what your soul is all about,” he continued. “And people going there and just spreading the love.”
On Oct. 6, 2023, Wiener’s love of psytrance brought him to the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, near Israel’s border with Gaza. The festival, a celebration of peace and love, turned into one of the deadliest sites in Israel’s history when Hamas terrorists invaded through the Gaza border at 6:29 a.m. the next morning.
Of the more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals killed on Oct. 7, more than 350 were attending the Nova Festival. Another 40 attendees were taken hostage and brought into Gaza.
Wiener, a former officer of combat engineering in the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Yahalom commando unit whose role included destroying tunnels found at the Gaza border, shared his experience last week at the Bedford Playhouse at a film screening marking the one-year anniversary of the attacks.
The screening, which brought viewers the harrowing documentary “Screams Before Silence,” was organized by the End the Silence Project of Northern Westchester, a grassroots organization aimed at combating antisemitism. Wiener was joined at the screening by Shoval Roberman, a 23-year-old Haifa native and another Nova Festival survivor.
The film, a presenter-led documentary featuring former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, featured footage and interviews documenting the carnage of the attacks both at the festival and throughout southern Israel. The film focuses on violence perpetrated against Israeli women, in particular sexual violence.
“These unspeakable attacks on our brave Jewish sisters, daughters and mothers have been met by a very clear and audible silence from women’s rights groups around the world,” Victor Khabie, the founder of End the Silence, said before the film. “The lack of outcry over the attacks on Jewish women is frankly, to me, outrageous.”
The documentary was shown to a packed audience at the Bedford theater, with emotions high through the film’s 57 gut-wrenching minutes. The event was held Tuesday, the day after the anniversary.
Wiener said the attacks of a year ago left him depressed, with his faith in God shaken. However, he believes that Israelis have found a greater sense of unity since last year. He pointed to raging divisions within the country over issues like judicial reform.
“Before the seventh it was like a distorted situation. Everybody hated each other,” he said. “It was crazy. So much hate between us. The right side of politics and the left side of politics, it was a disaster. I never saw it in my life. In Israel there was kind of pure hate.”
Though there are once again frequent protests in the country, now over calls for a deal to release the remaining hostages, the hatred within the country is nothing like it was before the attacks, Wiener said.
Wiener, meanwhile, has found a new sense of purpose traveling around the world and telling the story of his country’s resilience in the face of the Hamas onslaught.
“This is my mission from God to do,” he said. “This is why I am here and not in the military.”
Khabie, a northern Westchester orthopedic surgeon, launched End the Silence after the Oct. 7 attacks. The organization combats antisemitism through educational programs, with a strong focus on college campuses.
“After the horrific events of Oct. 7, as an orthopedic surgeon my first instinct was to get onto a flight to Israel and help out any way I could. That was my immediate instinct,” said Khabie. “I was about to do that, and then my daughters said to me, ‘Dad, you know they’ve got a lot of doctors in Israel. You are just going to be one of thousands of doctors. You could do more to help raise awareness of what’s going on here locally.”
