Four months after the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack at the Nova music festival, 23-year-old survivor Danielle Gelbaum returned to the dance floor.
“I thought to myself: ‘Oh my god, I am at a festival … and I’m not seeing any missiles? No rockets? No one is shutting down the music because of red alerts? This is real.’ And I started crying my eyes out. I felt happy, and then I remembered my friends,” Gelbaum tells Teen Vogue from Israel via phone.
“There is not even one time that I don’t have memories of my friends who were murdered,” she continues. “There’s no way I’m on the dance floor and not thinking of them.”
It has been one year since Hamas attacked the Nova music festival, an event meant to celebrate unity and music held roughly three miles from the Gaza-Israel border. The festival coincided with the Jewish holiday Sukkot, a joyful time to commemorate the 40 years that the Torah says Jews spent wandering the desert. According to Israeli officials, at least 360 concertgoers were killed during the attack — roughly one-third of the 1,200 people killed that day, the New York Times reports. Another 40 were taken hostage. At least 97 of the approximately 250 total hostages taken on October 7 are believed to still be held in Gaza, as of NBC News’s September 24 reporting. Since October 7, Israel has sustained a bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza that has killed more than 41,500 people, Reuters reports, the majority of whom were women and children.
In the year since the October 7 attack, as survivors still cope with lasting mental health effects and trauma, there’s also been a growing, though still small, movement of October 7 “truthers,” conspiracy theorists who deny the attack ever happened. To document and commemorate the lives lost in the attack, the Tribe of Nova Foundation has started the Nova Exhibition, a traveling installation that shares survivor stories and artifacts. The exhibition is currently in Los Angeles, and was recently extended through October 20. Gelbaum has been sharing her story with the Tribe of Nova Foundation.
“A lot of people don't … believe that we've been through what we've been through,” Gelbaum says. “I want people to look, to come to talk to me, to look me in the eyes, to see, to hear what I've been through, for me to show them what we've been through, so people will understand that it really happened.”
The memories of that day are still very present for Gelbaum, who managed to survive the Nova attack alongside her 25-year-old sister, Lior. It is impossible to “prepare” for the emotions or the memories that will no-doubt flood in on the one-year anniversary of the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.
“We’re going through the 7th again and again every day,” she explains. “How can I start … feeling like the 7th has ended when there are so many hostages, so many kids, parents, brothers, sisters, friends, who aren’t home yet?
“We came to heaven and we finished in hell that day,” she adds. “I’m still living the 7th. I think we all are.”
Gelbaum arrived at the site of the festival, near Re’im, at around 1:30 am on October 7 with one goal in mind: to worship.
“Some people pray at church; some people pray at the synagogue … I pray when I’m on the dance floor,” she says. “That’s the closest I feel to something bigger than me. That’s where I go to feel free.” The festival wasn’t new to her; these kinds of celebrations happen every few months, according to Gelbaum, but this one in October was set to be “next level.”
For nearly five hours, Gelbaum and her sister Lior danced alongside childhood friends and strangers alike. In need of a break, they returned to their tent at around 6:30 am to rest when Gelbuam says she can still remember “feeling something in the air.” At first, she says she wasn’t alarmed. When sirens warning festival-goers of missiles being fired, Gelbaum says it felt normal. “I’ll be honest, I live in Israel, I’m kind of used to rockets every once in a while,” she says of the missiles that are sometimes fired at Israel from Gaza by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, which are typically intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system. “We weren’t panicking.”
But then the feeling shifted. “It was like feeling an earthquake — you can’t see it, you can’t hear it, but you feel that something is going on,” she explains.
What followed still revisits Gelbuam nearly a year later. When the 23-year-old was in a traffic jam, she recalls trying to flee on Route 232, where dozens of people were ultimately killed.
“After a few moments of driving, we saw people just getting out of their cars and starting to run towards… everywhere,” she recalls. “So we got out of our car and we stood there for a few seconds … then I remember hearing the first gunshot.” When Gelbuam, who was born in St. Louis and moved to Israel when she was 5, hears ambulance sirens, she says she is reminded of the “missile sirens” that rang out that morning. “For me, it’s not just missiles… it’s going to be missiles and terrorists and something big I don’t even know,” she adds.
She can recall seeing a young woman shot in the leg and screaming. She can still remember, as she ran for her life towards the sun, looking to her right and “every few minutes, hearing a gunshot and seeing a kid falling down in front of my eyes.”
Gelbaum can also vividly recall the moment she realized that “we’re next.” “It was going to be me and my sister next if we don’t escape now, somehow,” she recollects, adding that her only goal that terrible morning was making sure she safely brought her sister back to their parents. “There’s no way I was going back home, facing (my parents) and saying: ‘Hi mom and dad, I survived but your other kid? Yeah, she was murdered.”
Eventually, the sisters were picked up by a pair of concert goers in a truck, along with 15 or so other concert attendees fleeing on foot. As gunshots continued to ring out, the truck managed to safely reach a police station, where Gelbaum remained until she and her sister found a ride home.
“That’s where my Nova story ends, but where my Nova healing journey just began,” she says. “(The attack) is surrounding me everyday. Sadly, it’s a part of me.”
The attacks and the ongoing war have deeply impacted people across the region. A recent study published in The Lancet found a significant increase in both depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among the Israeli population following the October 7 terrorist attacks, particularly for those who witnessed the attack. In an April 2024 letter, the American Psychiatric Association noted the broad mental health impacts of the ongoing war in Gaza, citing that the fighting “has destroyed and imperiled the lives and the mental and physical health of Palestinians, Israelis, and others in the region.” In Gaza, threats abound as entire families have been killed; as access to food, water, and basic health necessities have become increasingly scarce and prompted “catastrophic” conditions for citizens; and as mental health among survivors has plummeted, with extremely few resources available for help. In general, research has found that the impacts of war span far beyond loss of life, doing “long-term physical and psychological harm to children and adults.”
Gelbaum says that the Nova attack has brought PTSD symptoms, which set in a few months after the attack, after she returned to IDF service as a reservist. “I started getting the PTSD symptoms, like panic attacks, nightmares… everything you don’t want to feel,” she says. “Then I understood that I needed to go to therapy.”
During that process, Gelbaum also realized that in order to heal she needed to start “doing something for others, not just myself.” So she started linking up with groups that give tours of the site of the attack to share her story. She also found The Tribe of Nova Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting the survivors of the Nova attack.
“They saved me,” Gelbaum says of the foundation. “The Nova producers understood that they need to do something for the community, for the survivors, so we don’t feel alone. I think that the worst feeling after being in something like that was being alone … I remember feeling like an alien,” she continues.
Gelbaum eventually attended a “community day” put on by the foundation — gatherings with “healing zones” filled with Israeli artists, therapists, yoga and pilates instructors, musicians and more. Through the foundation, Gelbaum was also able to sign up for horseback riding therapy.
“When I saw all the survivors, it was the first time I felt at home,” Gelbaum says. “We all shared the same thoughts—the nightmares, the panic attacks, the guilt.”
Recently, Gelbaum came to the United States to participate in the Nova Exhibition, an installation commemorating the attack on the festival, and share her story to anyone willing to listen (The Tribe of Nova Foundation helps reimburse survivor expenses when traveling to share their stories). While painful and overwhelming at times, Gelbaum says she believes she ultimately survived in order to tell others what happened.
“I don't want people to feel sad for what I've been through, I don't want that,” she says. “I just want them to understand what we've been through and to think to themselves: ‘How can we all prevent it from happening again?’”
She also wants people to know that the October 7 attack wasn’t just a crime against Israelis or Jewish people.
“I always say that when the terrorists chased us, shooting everyone, they didn't stop us to ask us if we're Israelis or if we're Jews, because they shot everyone they could,” she says. “They shot Israelis and Jews, and they shot Christians, and they shot Muslims, and they shot Bedouin and they shot everyone. It wasn't a crime against Jews. It was a crime against humanity.”
Dealing with surviving that, she says, is an ongoing process.
“You can ask me today how I’m feeling, and I will say that I’m feeling OK. If you ask me tomorrow how I’m feeling, I could say that I’m feeling at rock bottom. It’s a journey — it’s ups and downs,” she adds. “But I am way more than a survivor … I am a human being.”
