Can one day off change your life?
Alex Bregman knows one can.
The Jewish Red Sox star spent the team’s April 28 off-day in Toronto at the Nova Exhibition, a traveling installation designed to “empower visitors to responsibly explore & bear witness” to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel and at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023.
Blue Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman invited Bregman when the American League East rivals opened their season series at Fenway Park in early April.
“I had no idea really what to expect,” Bregman told the Herald. “The experience was super intense and honestly, life-changing.”
Through photos, belongings, and objects from the festival, the Nova Exhibition takes visitors through an event dedicated to peace and love, and destroyed by violence, hatred, and evil.
Hamas, which the U.S. designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) on Oct. 8, 1997, invaded southern Israel as the sun rose. Accompanied and aided by Gazan civilians, Hamas tore through towns, Kibbutzim (communal settlements), and the festival, destroying homes and brutalizing, sexually assaulting, torturing anyone they found. They slaughtered over 1,200 civilians, including 411 from Nova. Of over 250 hostages taken back to Gaza, 43 were from Nova. Nearly 19 months later, 59 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including five Americans. Less than half are confirmed to still be alive.
When Bregman arrived, he found out he would be going through the exhibition with a Nova survivor.
“A lady who’s my age who survived October 7, a survivor, took us around on a tour of the exhibit, and showed us many of her friends who didn’t make it, her friends who made it, told us her story,” he said. “It just made the experience that much more real and intense.”
Together, they looked at objects and belongings salvaged from Nova. There are cars Hamas wrecked and set on fire, and portable toilets, the DJ stage, and tents from the campground, all riddled with bullet holes. They saw hundreds of personal effects in the lost-and-found, including countless shoes, eerily reminiscent of several Holocaust exhibits around the world.
“Just seeing that, seeing (bullet holes) in actual tents, or the cash register at the bar, or where the DJ was, it was nuts,” said Bregman. “I got (back to the hotel), called my wife and talked to her about it for an hour and a half and told her about everything and the stories that we heard there. Heartbreaking and really eye-opening.”
The traveling installation first opened in Tel Aviv, and was in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami before opening in Toronto on April 23. The Red Sox don’t return to Canada until September, long after the exhibition’s Toronto stint on June 8, but Bregman hopes the exhibit comes to Boston, or somewhere that overlaps with another road trip. He wants to go back, this time with teammates and members of the Red Sox organization.
“Once I finished the tour, I said ‘Wow, we need to get more people to see this and see what happened,’ and I told a lot of the guys, and a lot of them are interested in going whenever they can,” Bregman said of his teammates. “They were super interested in it, a lot of them were asking what the exhibit was. I spent 30 minutes explaining it and could’ve gone on still hours and hours more. Our clubhouse is full of great guys that are super supportive of it.”
Bregman and the Blue Jays also hosted Nova survivors at the series in Toronto that week. He’s thinking about doing something similar at Fenway this season. He also shared a slew of photos on Instagram, and was pleasantly surprised by the response.
“I got a lot of comments about it, overall really positive,” he said. “A lot of ‘Bring (the hostages) home’ and thank yous.”
What Bregman saw at Nova broke his heart, but he left strengthened in his resolve to be a more vocal, involved member of the Jewish community.
“I’ve always wanted to go (to Israel), and my wife wants to go as well,” he said. “And this just makes me want to speak out more and more.”
He also left something behind.
On a wall of photos of the faces of Nova where visitors can leave messages, he wrote, “Am Yisrael Chai, Alex Bregman.”
“The People of Israel live.”