Cars reduced to scraps of metal on a barren dirt parking lot. Shattered glass. Homes riddled with bullet holes. These scenes from Israel’s Nova music festival and Kibbutz Be’eri are now visible through a virtual reality experience that was brought to Fairfax on Oct. 29.
The “Be the Witness” VR experience, launched by the nonprofit ISRAEL-is, depicts five survivors’ stories from Oct. 7, 2023. Viewers stand in the very places where the Hamas massacre occurred, next to the survivors.
The goal? To amplify the voices of Oct. 7 and bring these narratives to a wider audience.
“We think that VR is one of the most powerful tools that we can [use to] show what happened in Israel,” Shira Rosenstein, ISRAEL-is’ public relations manager, said at the event.
A group of attendees gathered at the Pozez Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia to virtually meet Oct. 7 survivors Remo Salman El-Hozayel, Ofir Engel, Mazal Tazazo, Millet Ben Haim and Nimrod Palmach.
“Be the Witness” offers the option to hear each unique story. Viewers who select Ben Haim, who attended the Nova music festival, get to peer through the bushes that she and her friends hid behind during the Hamas attack. “I just made my peace with dying,” Ben Haim said in the VR.
Rosenstein said that hearing directly from survivors and going through their experience firsthand is “so different” from simply watching a video or reading testimony. Attendees agreed. “By seeing it through this [VR headset], I really felt like I was there,” said Cheryl Yellen, an Alexandria resident who attended the event. “You were able to look all around, see the destruction, see the carnage to people’s lives.”
The 360-degree view illustrates in painstaking detail the Nova music festival site after the Hamas attack, complete with burnt-out vehicles. Tree leaves rustle in a gentle breeze and the lifelike survivors move and blink as if they’re a few feet in front of the viewer. Small Israeli flags flutter in a panoramic view of the Nova memorial.
The project began as an Instagram page to archive testimonies from survivors and first responders immediately after Oct. 7.
“The world wanted to know what was happening in Israel,” Rosenstein said at the event.
The initiative has since expanded into a global educational tool that its producers hope will help combat any denial of the carnage Hamas unleashed that day. ISRAEL-is has already brought “Be the Witness” to London, Brazil, Mexico and various universities across the United States.
The program in Fairfax was a combination of VR viewing and sharing observations and takeaways with the group. A striking scene that stood out to multiple attendees came in the introductory video: stuffed animals lay untouched on a children’s bunk bed, in stark contrast to the dried blood coating the bedroom floor.
One attendee physically shuddered as she recalled the amount of blood. The producers of “Be the Witness” intentionally selected these photos to evoke emotions, Rosenstein said.
“[People] understand when they see what they’re familiar with,” she said, adding that “everyone” can recall the color of their childhood bedroom. “We want people to understand what happened, and Oct. 7 is so far from what people can understand, even Israelis.”
Rosenstein, who lives in her birthplace of Jerusalem, said it’s sometimes difficult for her to wrap her head around the sheer number of people killed and kidnapped on that day.
The community conversation and VR experience comes at a pivotal time for world Jewry. The last living hostages were released from captivity on Oct. 13 as part of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
“I think now is a good time to start talking about the survivors,” Rosenstein said. “We’ve been fighting. It’s a good time to start giving the survivors space to talk. … They didn’t die that day, [and] now is their time to say what happened, just like after the Holocaust.”
